


A Slow Ripening Fruit

by petpluto



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Introspection, Male-Female Friendship, Post Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-12-05 03:22:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 24,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petpluto/pseuds/petpluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit." - Aristotle<br/>Or, Weevil needs to crash with a friend. He chooses Veronica.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Just taking them out for a spin. Not mine.

When Weevil gets to his apartment and sees the gang waiting for him, lying in wait for him, he snaps. He doesn’t have the energy or the inclination for going up full of bluster and cocksuredness to fight for his right to enter his own front door. This isn’t home. Truthfully, he doesn’t know the last time he had one. He’d like to think his grandmother’s house, but that is wrapped up in Chardo and Felix and Hector and Thumper. And he can’t show up like a stray and crash at her place, not when she is so much to him, has done so much for him. Not when she’s got his younger cousins to worry over.

So, she’s no longer where he can rest his hat, and for the most part he is good with the lone wolf existence. Is ok with not fitting into his neighborhood, because he’s no longer in the gang and he’s too bloody to fit in with the others who have never been in with the gang. 

None of that helps when he wants to feel like he does belong, like he does have a place to go. Especially when he can’t get to the crappy place he’s overpaying for.

All he knows is that Veronica Mars is one of the only people who does feel like home, and she doesn’t say a word about the whys when she comes home and finds him on her couch. 

“Door locks don’t mean much to you, do they?” She questions drily, pulling bedsheets from the hall closet. The hall closet he felt like he would be an asshole to explore without her.

“What are you going to do, Vee? Call the cops?” He waggles his eyebrows at her, and she laughs.

“What I’m going to do is get you set up here, and then go to bed. And, in the morning, we’ll talk about whatever it is that has brought you to my doorstep 3 months since I last saw you.” She gives him a look that he thinks could be significant, but he just nods; takes the sheets and blankets and makes himself up a bed. 

“You moved,” he calls down the hall, after where she’d gone.

“I did,” the reply comes. No other information, but she’s Vee, so he figured that much.

“I don’t know who was more shocked tonight, me - or your dad when he found me on his couch.” He can hear her laughter tinkling down the corridor.

“So, he tell you where to find me?” She pops out again, this time in some pjs that make her look like she’s about twelve years old. Weevil hates this look, hates it because when she was twelve, she was innocent and chasing Lilly Kane and he was lifting bikes. Hates it, because it represents the path not followed. The path where he and Veronica Mars weren’t friends.

He could tell her that, but instead he nods. Grandiose pledges of death and love are better saved for Echolls. If the pictures around are any indication, he’s still an active part of her life. Weevil tries not to resent him so totally for it. “Tell you, though, I was surprised. Didn’t think you were ever going to be moving away from him.”

She looks at him, and then flops over next to him on his makeshift bed. “Yeah, well.” Looks at a point on a faraway wall. “I love him. Right? He’s one of the only people in my life I can fully say, without fear or worry of retribution, that I love. But as much as I love him, I also just needed - I wasn’t going to move on from being the old me surrounded by all those things. Plus, it’s easier for me if he and Logan don’t interact as much.”

“Things serious between you two?”

Veronica looks at him, serious and soft, and Weevil knows that the answer is yes. Has always been yes. Instead, she says, “Summer is our time.” 

He has no idea what that means. She leans back and gives a groan. He laughs at her. “You look like you’re twelve and sound like you’re eighty. What gives?”

She punches him. “Stake outs. Not as sexy as they are on tv.” She smirks, like she’s said something clever. “Well, as much as I’d love to continue this, I’ve got to get to bed.”

He smiles at her. “Alright, Vee. I’ll be here in the morning.”


	2. Chapter 2

He wakes up feeling like someone is staring at him; and when he opens his eyes, he discovers he was right. Logan Echolls is looking at him with a dark and haunted expression, holding his fist under his chin. Weevil wonders how long he’s been there. They sit there for another few seconds before a noise from Veronica’s room echoes through the living room.

“Snookums?” Echolls calls out, eyes never leaving Weevil’s, “What have we said about taking in strays?”

It hurts like it shouldn’t. He works hard at not flinching; but Veronica’s voice wafts down the hall and says, “To make sure they’re friendly first, and that they’ve had all their shots?” 

To someone else, it would seem like she was on Echolls’ side. But Weevil knows this game, and knows that Vee is the champ. He shrugs at Logan, takes her lead, and says, “And I’ve always been very friendly.” Lets the undercurrent of his meaning carry.

Echolls shakes his head and pads down the hall like he probably has a hundred times before, like he belongs here. Weevil’s not even sure why he feels disgusted. He knew they were dating, has seen them enough over the years to know that she’s drawn to him like a fucking magnet, like Lilly before her. He stretches and tries to eavesdrop on them without moving. Move, and Vee will know what he’s doing before he has the chance to do it. He doesn’t get anything but a bit of a headache for his trouble.

As he’s standing to unmake the couch, Vee bursts into the room as she makes her way to the kitchen. “Coffee? Pancakes?”

Echolls trails after her, like he always has. Like Weevil has himself. He finds himself thinking that he and Echolls have a lot in common in that respect. Always at the beck and call of a blonde little thing with a personality the size of Jupiter. Finds himself looking at Echolls as the other guy says, “You don’t want her pancakes.”

“What, you think I don’t like Weevil? You’re making the pancakes, honey doo.” Echolls rolls his eyes, but heads off to the kitchen too.

He pulls off the sheets, folds them, as he casually says, “Sure, Vee, pancakes and coffee would be good.”

He plops them down on the now bare couch as he makes his own way to the kitchen, and takes in the two of them dancing around each other like this was a consistent routine. Looks down. Wonders about sneaking out the front door instead of just standing here, feeling like that damn little matchstick girl. Thinks about cutting his losses and running back, and then Vee spins around smiles her hard little smile as she hands him a cup of coffee with a, “Sugar’s in the short cannister and milk’s in the fridge” - and like that, he feels enveloped again in whatever it is that draws him to Veronica Mars in the first place.

Echolls takes his place at the stove, asks the room whether they want silver dollars or pancakes. Weevil votes pancakes. Veronica votes silver dollars.

Echolls rolls his eyes. “Ronica, you’ll have to eat 40 silver dollars to even start to get full.”

Veronica looks belligerent. “So?”

Weevil can’t help but be amused. Even more so when Echolls looks to him for back up. “Come on, Ronnie. Weevil wants pancakes and he’s your guest.”

Veronica snorts. “Weevil broke in.”

“And don’t you want to keep an ex-con like him happy?”

“You just don’t want to have to make 40 silver dollars.” She pouts. “You don’t love me.”

Echolls is at a loss, and looks back to him for support.

“Don’t look at me, man. This ex-con knows which side his bread is buttered.” 

Veronica grins at him as Echolls grumbles in the background. She takes her own cup of coffee and leans against the wall next to him. Whispers surreptitiously, “Should I let him off the hook?”

Echolls stills, obviously waiting to see. Weevil vacillates for a second. His hatred of Echolls has faded over the years, but he can’t help but want to bust the guy’s balls from time to time. “How much do you want those silver dollars?”

Vee looks like she’s considering, and Weevil pushes further. “I think it may be one of those times where you owe me one.”

She snaps her fingers, and has an aw, shucks look as she says, “Pancakes it is.”

Echolls sidles over and gives her a kiss, and sips her coffee. “Three orders of pancakes, coming up.”

Three orders of pancakes are apparently three plates of at least eight pancakes each, but Veronica eats as much off of Echolls’ plate as she does off of her own. Steals a piece of bacon off of Weevil’s plate too.

It’s surprising how much he feels like he belongs.


	3. Chapter 3

“So,” Veronica starts later, as they’re walking back to her car after a long day of maintenance and her classes. “Wanna tell me what’s going on that makes me and my couch look like the place you most want to be?”

He shrugs, tries to pull off his tough guy persona. “Just some crap going down in the neighborhood.” He doesn’t need her trying to fix this, especially when he doesn’t know what this is, exactly. Makes his tone lighter, more faux jovial, “Trying to stay out of trouble, maintain the conditions of my parole. You know, for when you need me to break ‘em.”

She’s silent for a moment. If there’s one thing he loves about Veronica Mars above all else - and at the end of the day, he does love her - it is in regards to those times she chooses not to pry. For Vee, the world is a book that must be read, damn the consequences, and those days she decides to let the pages of someone else’s life go unturned are the days that make the difference between a cold hearted bitch and just a determined one. 

So when she nods and says, “You know, my apartment does have an office. We could set it up as a temporary living facility for those choosing to go the straightish and semi-narrow, if you were thinking about extending your stay at casa de Mars”, Weevil can barely stop himself from whirling her around like he’s seen Echolls done a time or twenty. 

Instead, he gives a gruff, “That so?”

She smiles up at him. “Of course, that means we’re going to have to procure an actual bed-like object. Can’t have you sleeping on the one and only couch.”

They wind up at her friend’s place, Wallace, and - after standing silently behind her and glaring at the other starring player in Vee’s sex tape debacle (who is shifting to and fro and looks deeply, deeply unhappy) - they leave with him and stop on the way to get Mac too.

“You know,” he says, pulling her aside for a moment, “I didn’t realize it took so many people to pick out a piece of furniture.”

She pffts at him, and says, “Hey, buddy, you think you’re the only one who’ll be using it?” Softens and whispers, “This is my first major purchase. I just want - I want the people in my life to like it.”

He pulls her closer to him, mindful of the looks he’s getting from the other two. “And why isn’t Echolls here?”

She grins. “Logan? He’d break out in hives if he had to go where we’re going.”

Weevil doesn’t ask where they’re going, but it turns out to be an Ikea. On the way, the three of them - Mac, Wallace, and Vee - sing loudly to the radio in the car while he tries not to look like he’s amused by them. At all. 

Then, while Vee and Wallace run around the store like nuts, he walks quietly with the more sedate member of the group. 

“Try this one,” Vee gasps as she skids in front of them, cutting off an irate looking woman carrying a rug, before pulling them back the way she came. Weevil watches as she pulls Mac down with her onto what has to be one of the most hideous pieces of furniture in creation as Wallace flops, all arms and legs, beside them, and then looks at him expectantly.

“Whatever, Vee.”

“Come on, man,” Wallace calls. “You gotta try this.”

Vee does her head tilt, and he looks at the three of them smushed together in odd angles on a lime green monstrosity. He sighs, and walks over to the couch with a swagger. Flops down. “Vee, this shit is as uncomfortable as it is ugly.”

She giggles and Wallace grins. “I know. Isn’t it great?”

He can’t help but feel panicked. “I’m not sleeping on this. I’m not going anywhere near this, ever again.”

Mac pats his hand. “You shouldn’t say things like that. It’ll only encourage her to buy it.”

They end up with a futon, a somewhat comfortable grey one, with storage underneath and a cover for it so it’ll match the neutrals of the room. He feels vaguely wrung out, and like he knows more about cheap-but-chic (as opposed to his cheap-and-cheap) home furnishings than he ever planned or needed to. He can just see himself out on a date with a girl and accidentally mentioning BESTÅ, and have it all go to shit. But Vee looks thrilled with her purchase, and schedules to have it delivered on his day off.

“Know what, Weevs?” She bounces up to them after, where Wallace is eating Swedish meatballs and Mac looks like she’s going to hurl everywhere.

He can’t help his indulgent smile. “What?”

“You’re going to have a blast putting that thing together.” She has that look on her face that says she’s getting a sadistic form of pleasure out of his pain, and he groans.


	4. Chapter 4

He knows he should tell her about the card machine, about the scams he’s thinking about running, about how the life is calling to him and how it is getting harder and harder to resist when everyone who looks at him sees low-life ex-convict. How it’s hard to go to a place where everyone else is going to be moving on to bigger and better and in the meantime get to drink themselves into a stupor, and he gets the dubious privilege of fixing their locks or unjamming their sinks when they decide that is a better place to puke their guts out than the toilet ever could be. How he used to get respect when he rode with the gang, and now he’s treated like a cockroach.

He knows if he starts again, he’ll probably get caught again. And crashing with her will mean she gets caught in the crossfire. 

But whenever he’s thinking about it, about doing any of those things, about letting the rage in him come rushing out and proving that he is the big bad wolf instead of her tamed guard dog, she smiles at him, or invites him along on a stakeout, or orders extra Chinese for the movie nights she and her boyfriend do with startling regularity.

Whenever he thinks about going back, something like that stops him. He didn’t know one person thinking he wasn’t the scum on the bottom of her shoe would do that so well. But it does.

He still keeps the card machine. He still pulls the odd job, still occasionally boosts a car and brings it to the chop shop. But all in all, he’s doing it mostly to keep up his skills on the chance he’ll return to that life. Not because he’s biding his time before he does.

It’s a strange and somewhat stultifying way to live.


	5. Chapter 5

Echolls walks in one day, using a key Weevil wasn't aware he had. Sees Weevil and says without much heat, "Ronnie's still letting you take advantage of her hospitality?"

"You know, I offered to pay rent in sexual favors, but..." Grins nastily at the guy, who just looks at him.

"I asked her to move in with me."

Weevil feels the bottom fall out of his metaphorical boat. "Oh. Guess I should find a new place to crash then."

Echolls looks frustrated. Struggles to clarify. "No, when she was looking at this place. I asked her to move in with me."

It occurs to Weevil that Echolls, he of the money and the fame, is jealous. He has nothing to say. 

"I get it," Echolls continues. "She needs to be able to run. But -" He waves at Weevil, “you’re here. You’ve practically moved in.”

“You think I mean half as much to her as you do?”

Echolls meets his incredulity head on. “Yes. Not in the same way, but yes. All the crap she’s pulled for you? All the shit she’s taken on faith because you told her? Yeah.”

It’s like there’s a light shining on him in this moment. In this moment, he has something that Logan Echolls wants. Sure, it’s Veronica, and he doesn’t want her like that (doesn’t know how he wants her, exactly, but knows it’s not like that), but it is something. After everything, after Lilly, after fights on beaches and skulking around Hearst’s grounds as the hired help - as if that’s all he could ever aspire to be - while watching Logan flirt and probably fuck his way through the attractive coeds, he is allowed in Veronica’s inner sanctum in a way Echolls isn’t. Weevil could, should, put the guy out of his misery. 

But instead he just says, “Well, what do you know? So, uh, does she take you on faith?”

Echolls scowls. Doesn’t say anything. But Weevil has his answer. And, like the good poker player he is, kind of knew that one ahead of time.


	6. Chapter 6

There are days when he doesn’t feel like ‘Weevil’. That name comes from another time, another place. Not now, when the closest thing he has to a best friend is a little blonde nothing who doesn’t like to talk about anything of importance and has a history of accusing him - rightly or wrongly - of committing dastardly acts of crime. Not here, when he’s in a nice-ish apartment rented by the same blonde and sleeping on a piece of Swedish furniture.

But he’s not ‘Eli’, either. He hasn’t felt like Eli since he was a pre-teen, and doesn’t know if he wants to go back to being the curly haired kid who had to toughen up or end up splattered on the pavement. 

He wonders how Vee does it. She was cotton candy and princess pink, and then became wounded warrior with a heart of gold, and now seems to be working toward a third persona all together. And yet, she remains ever Veronica Mars.

He envies that.


	7. Chapter 7

He’s doing some routine maintenance in one of the classrooms when he sees Wallace’s roommate pulling Vee with him. Normally, he’d shrug it off - since she became Little Miss Junior Detective in high school, someone has always been looking to hurry her into quiet and private places so they could reveal their needs and wants and wishes. He’s done it himself. But something about this seems strange.

So, he follows along, and that’s how he gets to hear things he really wishes he hadn’t. Makes him wonder why he thought eavesdropping on Vee was ever a good idea. Makes him wonder if she knew he was eavesdropping, and is playing him like the bitch he knows she can be. Makes him wonder if there’s some hole in the earth he and this guy Piz can crawl into.

Vee starts. Of course she does. Starts with a, “Piz, whatever this is about, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it to me.”

Weevil can practically hear the kid shuffling his feet. “Um, yeah, I just - when we broke up you said you needed some time alone, that there was too much on your plate with the internship and everything. But now, you’ve been back for months, and I just -”

He hears her sigh, can practically visualize the put out look on her face when she realizes she’s going to have to deal with this. “Piz, look, I know what I said. But I just can’t do this. I’m with -”

Piz cuts her off, says, “With who? That scary biker looking dude?”

It takes a second for Weevil to realize the guy is talking about him. It takes Veronica a second too, if her bewildered, “Scary biker looking dude?” Is to be believed. She recovers quickly, though, hurriedly saying, “Weevil? You think I’m dating Weevil? No. He’s just living with me.”

Somehow, Weevil thinks, that’s probably not going to be reassuring. Piz’s yelped “Living with you?” confirms it.

“Yeah,” Vee says airily, like she has a rotation of guys living with her.

“So, who are you dating then? Isn’t he upset with -”

It occurs to him that this guy has no clue who he is. Vee really does keep a lot of shit on lockdown. And she takes that moment to say, “Logan is actually ok with it.”

“Logan.” The kid’s voice drops. “The guy who beat the crap out of me? The guy you said you were going to cut out of your life forever? That Logan.”

“That’s the one!” Veronica’s voice is getting unnaturally high.

“What is it about him? Why are you with him? Is he that good at sex?”

Weevil pulls himself away from the door. There’s no way that kid just asked that. On the plus side, there’s no way Vee’s going to answer that.

“Short answer? Yes. He’s that good. He does this thing with his tongue that I don’t think you would ever be able to figure out.” The thing Weevil forgot for a second is that Veronica is vicious. She’s an expert at carving people up, wearing them down. When she continues, her voice has lost that bite. “But what he really is, is someone who gets me. He’s it. I can’t explain it, and I can’t rationalize it. But he’s who I want. And he wants me too.”

“Are you so broken that a guy like that is the only one who can do it for you?” Piz throws back, and it’s all Weevil can do to not rush in that and beat him down.

But Veronica has it. “Yeah. I am broken. And Logan’s broken too. So, before you get on your high horse, Beaverton, let’s get one thing clear: I’m not someone you should have ever put on a pedestal. I had one once, and the fall nearly killed me. And I’m not something you can piece back together and make good as new. I’m me. I’m fucked up, and I fuck up, and I need someone in my corner who sees the world the way I do and doesn’t judge me for not being sugary sweet and willing to take what people throw at me. We dated because I was hurting and wanted someone who wasn’t. And we broke up because when everything went to shit, there were people in my life who stepped up to help me do what I needed to do, and you weren’t one of them. I’m not sorry for that. And I’m late for work.”

With that, she leaves Piz behind, and whirls away down the hall so fast she misses Weevil on the other side completely. Weevil, who can’t help but work it over in his head. She thinks she’s broken. It is absurd.

She thinks Logan is broken. That is something he can’t believe.


	8. Chapter 8

A month into his new living arrangement, long after whatever was going down with the PCHers has probably faded into nothingness and he could return home, Echolls pulls up and suggests they go retrieve his stuff. He’s been back there a couple of times, in the early morning hours when most of the inhabitants of his part of town are asleep. Those hours between 5 and 7 on weekends, when everything is soft in the barrio. He’s grabbed what he could and gotten out, not wanting to stay long. Afraid of getting sucked back in.

He’s hesitant, doesn’t want to go back with this rich white boy. But Veronica walks toward them and slurs out a, “S’up?”

And he’s done. He’s in the passenger seat of Echolls’ car with Mars in the back, and the three of them snark round and round like a carousel ride until they pull up to his dingy building. 

It takes them a very short amount of time to get all of his stuff out of the apartment. He can’t say he isn’t surprised to find packing material in the back of Echolls’ ride. Pulls him aside before Vee can get done handing in the keys to his apartment, and asks, “What’s all this?”

The guy just smirks. “Look, paco, if you’re trying to tell me you don’t understand a helping hand -” 

“No, I mean, why make it easier for me to move in with Vee?”

He turns serious. “Veronica needs someone. To talk to. To hang out with. Someone who isn’t me. And fuck it all if she hasn’t decided it’s going to be you.”

“And why me?”

Logan is kinetic energy, and is messing with his hair as he says, “Dunno. Probably because Piz is Wallace’s roommate and Parker is Mac’s, and she doesn’t want to go and be fucked up around the two of them. Probably because you moved your ass in to her place. Probably because you’re one of the only people who sees the world the way we do.”

Weevil’s eyes narrow. “The way you two do, huh?” Looks around, makes sure Vee’s still occupied. The old crone he’s renting from seems to be talking her ear off, so he turns back. “What does a rich white boy know about how I see the world?”

The other guy looks bored. “Look, if you’re really interested, you’ve really gotta stop seeing the world in black and white. Or Hispanic and white. Whatever.”

Later on, when Echolls has escaped to make it to his class and he and Veronica are trying to figure out what stuff of his is being kept and which isn’t, he brings it up with an, “Echolls says we see the world the same.”

Vee looks up from trying to decide which beat up pot is the one they’re keeping and says, “Yeah, and?”

“And,” he continues as he organizes their DVDs, “I’m wondering what a cute white girl and Richie Rich know about my life.”

“Oh, Eli,” Vee starts, and she’s looking at him like he’s a kid and she’s a hundred, “after all we’ve done for each other, you think I don’t know how you work?”

“And Echolls?”

She stiffens, and if he hadn’t been watching for it, he wouldn’t have seen it. But there was something about him today that, if it didn’t scream broken then certainly pointed to that possibility. And Weevil was always pretty good at the detective thing. “Logan’s got his scars.”

And then she’s flitting around, shutting down that conversation completely and deciding what they should have for dinner before he offers up his tamales for the evening’s feast.

For the first time in a long time, he thinks that maybe he doesn’t know everything about what it was to grow up in the World of Echolls. He knows about the cheating, and who didn’t? But the way Vee moves him away from the subject makes him think of darker things. He doesn’t know what to make of that, how to reconcile that with the guy Echolls is.


	9. Chapter 9

He wonders, sometimes, why he does feel so comfortable with two people that, by all rights, he shouldn’t. 

He knows a lot about Vee. Did some investigating of his own after their first real meet and greet at her lunch table. Knew about her, the before her, due to his constantly being hauled into the station and because Lilly would talk about her when she wouldn’t talk about anything else. He’s closer to understanding how he fits with her than he is with Echolls; more importantly, he cares less how he fits with her. He does; she does; they do. Sometimes, it really is that simple.

Somewhere around the time Echolls started showing up when Vee wasn’t there - and wasn’t supposed to be - with video games and alcohol, he started trying to puzzle him out. There’s not a lot for him to go on. Echolls has walls he thinks only Vee can get behind, and the beauty of it all is that he plays at being open. His secrets stay secret, because he’s able to let people think he’s showing them his world. It’s the opposite of Vee’s approach, where her secrets stay secret because she locks everyone out, even if they are her world. He likes Vee’s approach better, personally.

So, this mystery occupies a lot of the time he has to think when he’s on the job. And it takes up some of the time he has when Vee forces him to dine with this rag tag group of people she’s assembled around herself. Which, now, is every Tuesday and Friday. 

The first time it happened, the first time she popped his car door lock and head tilted her way into his eating lunch with her, he swore it would be his last. But he must have some sort of masochistic tendencies he was unaware of, because he keeps coming. He keeps coming and watching the strange interplay between these people.

The table is separated in threes. He, Vee, and Echolls are at one end, Vee’s boy Wallace and Mac sit in the middle - sometimes with others, sometimes just themselves - and at the other end, is a blonde named Parker who eyes his tattoos like they’re going to leap from his skin and bite her, and the ex-Piz. He doesn’t know why they all come; and judging by the small talk, neither do they.

But it starts him thinking. He’s pretty sure, through the veiled comments he’s heard, that everyone at the table has some kind of deep, dark, soul-twisting secret - except maybe Piz. But for everyone else but the three of them, it feels like there’s still a lightness to these people. Those secrets haven’t scarred them. They’re still young. He and Vee and Echolls aren’t.

Once upon a time, he wondered if the reason the three of them are who they are is because of Lilly Kane. They each knew her, and loved her. And they each held a part of her that the outside world didn’t. But that gives Lilly too much power; and as much as he obsessed over her, he’s pretty sure there is something else driving this. Lilly may have been the catalyst, but for once she doesn’t have any deeper meaning than that. He’s not sure if that makes it better or worse.


	10. Chapter 10

They’re sitting on the couch playing Halo when Weevil finally breaks down and asks, “What’s up with you and Veronica anyway?”

Logan doesn’t pause, doesn’t look at him at all when he says, “What, your girl hasn’t filled you in?”

Weevil sits in silence, waiting. Echolls breaks. He always does. Always has to fill the air with words.

“Look, it is what it is. She and I, we’re two peas in a pod. We’re two halfs of an oreo. We’re two great tastes that taste great together.”

“So, you don’t know.”

“I fucked up. I fuck up a lot. I’m sure you’ve noticed. And, as I’m sure you haven’t, she isn’t exactly a saint. So, after my last fuck up, she told me we were going to be taking things slow. No titles. No expectations. No... ...illusions.”

“But you asked her to move in with you.”

Logan grimaces. “Yeah, well, had to try, right? She’s got all these trust issues, which is a product of a lot of crap that I’m only like an eighth responsible for. But I’m still holding the bag for that eighth, and I’m still the one around who gives a crap about making it up to her.”

“I was there, man. In high school, I was there.” Weevil shakes his head. “I saw the shit you pulled on her after Lilly.”

“Yeah, like I said. I fuck up.”

“Maybe what you mean to say is that you are a fuck up.”

“That too.” Logan pauses, turns to half face Weevil. “But here’s the thing you don’t seem to notice, since you’ve buffered her halo to a nice sheen. She’s a fuck up too. And, buddy, so are you.”

Weevil holds his stare. “I don’t think she’s anything other than what she is. There’s no halo, and there’s no pedestal.”

Logan snorts. “Oh, really? And what is she?”

“She’s someone who deals with all your shit, for one. I mean, man, I see you. I’m working around campus, and you’ve got, like, this harem of girls around you at any given time. And you’re flirting up one hell of a storm for someone who’s got Vee.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look, I know you said that it’s not a relationship or whatever, but even when you’re in a relationship you’re still out there. You did it with Lilly, and you do it with Veronica.”

“Are you saying that I don’t deserve Veronica, because I’m a flirt?”

“I’m saying you don’t deserve Veronica, because maybe you do more than flirt.” Weevil looks at him out from under his eyelashes. “You know what they say about jealousy.” 

“That it’s anger turned inward?” He snaps his fingers. “No, that’s what they say about depression.”

“Whatever, man.”

That is what propels Logan off the couch. “Whatever? Whatever? Look, Weevil, I don’t know if you know this, but Veronica has standards that I can never measure up to. And whenever I think I’m getting close, she raises the bar. The girl believes in negative reinforcement all the way, okay? So, unless you’ve got something really concrete, get the hell out of my nonrelationship.”

“Okay, how about this? While you’re all up in here thinking you’re not in a relationship, Vee’s telling her ex that you’re her boy.”

Echolls stills. Weevil is amazed at how odd it looks to have him not moving at all. “What?”

“All I’m saying is that while you’re living without labels, Veronica’s chosen one for herself. And it’s your girlfriend.”

“Why wouldn’t she tell me?” He sounds a little lost, maybe a little broken. Weevil shifts uncomfortably.

“I don’t know, man. Maybe because she’s Vee? You’re all with the grand statements, right? Vee’s like the opposite of that. She’s gestures. Know what she told me when I crashed here that first night? That her dad is the only person she feels comfortable saying she loves. I mean, I love the girl, but that’s a hard way to live.”

Echolls sits back down, picks up the controllers again. Minutes pass. “I don’t sleep around.”

“Alright.” He can’t even help the disbelieving tone he has when he says it. It bubbles up from his bones. 

“I mean, when I’m with Veronica, I don’t sleep around. Even if we’re not doing labels. When I’m with Veronica”, he exhales, “there’s nobody else. Nobody worth having. Nobody worth hurting her.”

“Yeah, well, good. But maybe you should think about not looking so open to the idea, you get what I’m saying? Because you lapping up what every Barbie, Tiffany, and Betty throws at you probably isn’t helping your case with her trust issues.”

“Are you - are you giving me advice on how to keep Veronica?”

Weevil snorts. “I’m giving you my understanding of how to keep a woman happy. You already got Vee. You just gotta work on making her not feel like shit around you. And flirting with floozies isn’t going to be making her feel all worldly, if you know what I’m saying.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Damn, man, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you’re covering all the fucking walls of this apartment. But you hurt her, and I -”

“Hurt me? Yeah, I got it. You’re going to have to join the queue for that one.”

He can’t help it. He laughs at that. And he thinks that if he tried hard enough, he could probably see some of the tension evaporating between them. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But the little bit that has clung to Veronica like a bad perfume is slowly fading away.


	11. Chapter 11

He never thought he’d have an actual routine, but here he is, rushing around a kitchen to fill two cups of coffee, and popping toast for breakfast as his roommate makes their lunches before hurrying off to the car. It’s nice. Almost peaceful.

Of course, once the car door closes and Veronica starts pulling away towards campus, that ends.

First, she’s just stone cold silent, and he’s prepared to sit there the entire way without engaging. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s just pissed at the world, so he’s not sure it has anything to do with him. She cures him of that delusion as they get closer to the university, with a sharp, “So, I hear you and Logan are buddies now.”

“He and I may have bonded over Halo.” He looks at her. “What’s up, Vee? You jealous or something? Because I gotta tell you, he’s got nothing on you.”

“No, it’s just... You spied on me.”

“And you’ve spied on me. What of it?”

She’s silent, but her lips are pressed together and thin, and there is a tension to her that he can’t deny.

“So, what, Vee? I can crash in your guest room but I can’t actually talk to your people?”

She shakes her head. “No. That’s not it.”

“Oh, okay. So, it’s only Logan I’m not supposed to talk to. Good to know. I’ll be sure to zipper up around him. Or maybe it’s not just him. Wanna make me a list of who I can and can’t talk to?”

“You don’t get it.”

“Well then, explain it to me.” He can feel the rant rolling under his skin, just aching to get out. Feels the old anger swelling up, and says, “You know what Vee? I think you just want me on a chain so you can parade me around. But the second I do anything that you don’t like, you’re pushing me back down. So, what is it? Am I not good enough to be around your college friends? Do I not measure up to Romeo in there?” They’re at Hearst and Vee’s parking as he leans over to yell, “What the fuck is your problem?”

“You’re mine!” She turns white and is out of the car faster than he could imagine was possible, as he tries desperately to untangle himself from the seat belt.

By the time he gets out of the car, she’s nowhere in sight. So he heads off to the maintenance office and makes sure to get the rotation where her afternoon class is.

Hours later, when he sees her heading out of the classroom, he hooks her arm before she can say boo or scamper off.

“What the fuck, Vee?”

She looks at him defiantly. “What the fuck, Eli?”

“Oh, no, you’re not turning this around on me. We go weeks living great together, I have one day with your boy where the two of us actually get along, and you turn to the ice bitch from hell. So why don’t you fill me in on what you’re on.”

She hunches her shoulders, and looks small. “People like Logan.”

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah, well, they don’t like me.” She turns her head away from him, but lets him keep holding on to her arm.

He steps back, looks her up and down. “I like you fine.” Gives a leer and an eyebrow waggle for good measure.

She scoffs, and cuffs him like he hoped she would. “I’m sorry. I was just stressed. And I didn’t mean it.”

He looks at her, long and hard. She still looks small, and worn out. “Yeah,” he finally says. “Alright. But if you did mean it, you should know you got nothing to worry about. You’re my girl.”

She nods, but he gets the feeling like she’s not focused on him anymore. “Right.”

And just like that, he knows he’s not getting the whole story.


	12. Chapter 12

She comes home late, after her shift at the library has ended, dropped off by Echolls. Weevil is waiting. “So. I haven’t seen Fennel or Mac around lately.”

She doesn’t even jump. He’s a little annoyed by that. “What do you mean? We see them at lunch, every Tuesday and Friday.”

“Yeah,” he says, standing up. “At lunch. With other people. They were around for that bed buying trip, but other than that, I can’t remember seeing them here for them to admire what their input bought.”

She shrugs. “They’ve been busy.”

He nods. “And this has nothing to do with the fact that your ex is your boy’s roommate and Echoll’s ex is rooming with your girl.”

“Parker broke up with him. Not the other way around.”

“And yet, loyalties are what they are. Roommates, and best friends. Tangled webs, huh?” 

“I guess,” she says, hugging herself. “I’m going to head to bed.” She points at him, trying to look stern. “It’s your turn to make lunch tomorrow, don’t forget.”

“Yeah, Vee, I know. Not going to let me live that one down.”

“One?” Her voice rings out as she heads toward her bedroom. “Try four. I’m a growing girl, buddy. I need my nutritional sustenance.”

He chuckles, and listens to her nightly routine. He prides himself on being smart, and on being observant enough to know how to use people’s ideas about poor, dumb Mexicans to his own benefit. That doesn’t help him here. Neither of those things are assets when it comes to Veronica Mars. He has half a mind to go and be threatening, demand the answers she won’t give up from the others - but when it comes down to it, he doesn’t think that’ll help either.

Vee is alone. Vee is consistently alone. It’s been true since high school. He shakes his head. No, it’s been true since Lilly died, in high school. Before that, she was holding court with the rest of them. 

He thinks briefly of going to Echolls, but dismisses it as quickly. And instead, he makes a plan to get the keys to Mac’s dorm room. Maybe even Fennel’s.


	13. Chapter 13

When the call comes three days later, he’s prepared for it. Sees the name on the ticket, and tells them he’ll go. One of the other guys jokes about it being his girl’s room, and it’s close enough to the truth and so far away from it all at the same time that he nods and gives his best smile. All teeth. 

They’re both there when he knocks, and Mac waves him into the room. She’s hunched over a little bit, like she knows what’s going on. She probably does, since it looks like she messed with it first before calling it in.

“Veronica said you don’t work Thursdays,” Mac starts, and if everything she said didn’t sound sweet, he’d think she was trying to be accusing. He saunters over to the sink, putting enough in his gait to make him look just gang enough. It’s a hard balance to strike, sometimes. Being just enough of something to get something else. Being just respectable enough. Being just street enough. The stakes aren’t nearly so high here, though, that he can’t push it.

“That was last semester. This semester, I’m on. You having plumbing problems? I see you tried to monkey with it yourself. That’s dangerous.” He pauses. “You could be charged fees for that.” 

He sees the blonde huddle further onto the bed, and Mac rolls her eyes at him. “Why don’t you skip to the part where you fix it?”

“Sure. Anything for a friend of Vee’s.” 

He’s watching as Mac stiffens, and then gives him what amounts to a baby glare. He pulls out a wrench and disappears under the sink.

The thing that the Logan Echollses of the world don’t realize, the thing that he and Veronica and Sheriff Mars do, is that most people don’t need probing questions or fists in order for them to spill their guts. Most people just need a pull. A soft and swift slice with a scalpel can get better results than hacking away at something with a machete. One little cut and the itching starts. And even though he’s great at blunt force trauma, both physically and verbally, Weevil gets a perverse pleasure in this other thing.

“How is she?” He’s surprised that it’s the blonde on the bed who starts, the one who is afraid of him.

He doesn’t pause in his work. “She’s Veronica.” He thinks he hears a snort come from the other one. 

“That’s helpful. ‘She’s Veronica’”, Mac mimics, her voice muffled.

“What can I say? You two probably see her more than I do. I only live with her. You’re both in the whole college mindset. Don’t have to work 8 to 10 hour days.” 

“We’re all busy.”

“Yeah, you two look all busy, waiting for me to unclog your drain.” He pulls out a man’s sock. Sits up and grins as he shows them his treasure. “The damnedest things find their way into the plumbing around here. Just last week, I had to get a snake out of a freshman’s pipes.”

Mac shakes her head at him, and from underneath the blue stripes she holds his gaze. “So, thanks, Weevil. For the chat. And the sock.”

He throws the sock away and moves to wash his hands in the recently unclogged sink. “Just doing my job. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Same bat time, same bat lunch table?”

Mac shakes her head again, and then says, “Yeah. I guess we will.” Pauses for a second, and follows up with, “Out of curiosity, which job?”

“You know I’m gainfully employed by this fine institution of higher learning.”

“Yeah, but I also know you’re sometimes employed by a certain private dick.” He gazes about the room and sees that Parker also looks interested in his answer.

“Yeah, the PI didn’t hire me to harass her friends. She’s more discerning in how she chooses to use my, uh, talents.”

Mac nods, looking unhappy, and Parker blushes at the underlying innuendo as he makes his way back through the door.


	14. Chapter 14

“You stuffed a sock in Mac’s sink?” 

Weevil sighs. Naps were becoming a precious commodity in his life. “Now why would I go and do something like that?”

Wallace is standing by his window, his mouth set firmly in a line. “Because you’re an asshole who wanted to make a point?”

He closes his eyes again. “And what the hell kind of point does a sock make?” He doesn’t say it, but he’s pretty sure they both know what it is.

“Maybe you wanted to get in there and talk to her.”

Enough. Weevil shifts so that he’s looking fully at Wallace now. “And why would I need to do that? I see her twice a week, like clockwork.”

He’s close enough to see that Wallace is pissed. “You think you can just fuck with us? You think that Vee’s gonna like it?”

“What I think is that for Vee to know, someone would have to talk to her about it. And from where I’m sitting, nobody’s been talking to her about much.”

“You don’t get it.” 

“No, I think I do. Mars dated your roommate for a hot second, and then ended up running back to Echolls like anyone who’s been around them for more than one round knows is going to happen. But he’s still your roommate. And Echolls? Well he dated the blonde chick for a different but overlapping hot second, and she’s still Mac’s roommate. And it’s easier to avoid her than it is to avoid them.”

Wallace closes his eyes. “I’m so fucking pissed at her, you don’t even know.”

“I can see it.”

Her best friend throws him a suspicious glance. “Yeah? How so?”

“You think I’ve never been so angry at her I could wring her neck? She’s better at pissing people off than anyone else.”

Wallace smiles. “Yeah she is.”

He checks his watch. “Look, I’ve got a hot fourteen minutes before I gotta get back, so if you don’t mind shoving off, I’m gonna nap a little longer.”

Wallace doesn’t move. “Why you doing this?”

“You know Vee got me this job?” Wallace looks surprised. “Yeah, she did. After she got her old man to hire me, and I fucked that up. And she’s kept me out of jail as much as she could. I’m pretty sure she’s done some major shit for you, too, after that first one.” 

“So, this is what? Repayment?”

“This is friendship. You got your boy, and I got your girl.” He wants to call Vee his girl, because she is; but this isn’t about him or his claim on her. This is about fixing things that got broken for her. And that means putting his issues aside and working the buttons he knows are there.

Wallace nods; and if Weevil were (still) a betting man, he’d bet that the guy got the message. “I’ve got to get to class. It’s just going to take time.”

“Yeah, time. But some of that time can still be spent with her, you get me?”

He nods again, and before he goes, says, “You’re a good friend to her. She know that?”

He laughs. “She’s a better friend to me. You know that?”

He reflects on it as he watches Wallace amble away. He was so quick to get the last word, because he didn’t want the other guy to have it, especially when it was a dig at her. But while it’s not true in the strictest sense, it feels true. He’s a good friend because he violates his parole for her. She’s a good friend because she makes it safe enough for him to do it. It’s not the kind of relationship that fills the preteen books his cousins read, where being best friends means sharing secrets and promises of forever. But it’s the kind of relationship he feels safe in. Loyalty camouflaged as quid pro quo. Forever owing favors that they pretend come due. He hates that the veneer has cracked a bit for him. It just makes it that much easier to fear losing what he tried so desperately not to know he has.


	15. Chapter 15

He’s finishing up for the day when he gets her text, telling him that Mac has invited her to an Italian film screening on campus. It’s hard not to smile at that, and he tells her to have a good time. Tells her he’ll see her at home.

When she does come home, she’s followed by Mac, and by Wallace. And then by Parker and Piz. 

She’s already vibrating with nervous energy, her eyes wide and bright, and so he pulls her to the side and says, “Not to make matters more interesting, but Echolls is in your room.”

She looks at him and nods, as if she expected this. “Right, ok. Can you order pizza? Make sure you get a veggie one for Mac. And - oh, see if they’ll deliver soda? I don’t think we have anything to drink. And - “

“Vee, go. I’ll take care of it. All of it.”

She lets out a breath and steps closer to him. “I just - I haven’t done this in a while.”

He can’t stop the protective feeling that takes hold of him. Blondes have always brought it out; and for this blonde in particular, the instinct goes into overdrive. So, he gently pushes her to the room. “You go. Take some time with him, warn him about the unexpected guests. And then come back out and do this right.”

It’s uncomfortable, to say the least, without Veronica there as a buffer. A couple of middle-to-upper middle class folks and a former gang member usually don’t have cause to hang out, and moments like Parker asking him if he listens to “gangster rap” prove why bridging the gap is probably unthinkable in most cases. She looks genuinely interested in his answer, though, so there's something to hold onto. Weevil wishes he didn’t have to make nice, but one of the cases where this was bound to happen is wrapped up in Veronica Mars. He looks at Mac and chuckles.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just... Veronica. Bringing 09ers and 02ers and all others together. Who’d know that a girl with a gift for alienating people had it in her?”

Wallace and Mac both smile. Piz and Parker both look confused. It’s Parker who asks the inevitable, “What’s an 09er?”

And it’s Logan who answers from the doorway. “Boy, nothing like that question to cement the fact you’re not from around here. Or maybe we’ve just stopped caring. Have we, Weevil?”

Weevil shrugs. “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t think we’ve grown that much.”

Logan smirks, and turns his attention back to the blonde. “90909 is the richest area in Neptune. It goes down from there. 90902 is, well, Weevil’s area. Not so nice. Pretty blondes are not a common commodity down in the barrio.”

“There’s one pretty blonde who does pretty well for herself down there.” Weevil nods in the direction of Veronica’s room. “She’s never had any trouble.”

“Veronica Mars,” Logan drawls, “Only comfortable around those of whom others are uncomfortable around.”

It sounds like Wallace chokes back a laugh at that. “Man, we should have that put on business cards.”

“It’s a little long for a business card. Maybe a banner,” Mac breaks in. 

Veronica comes out shyly, and for a half a moment, Weevil sees the girl he never paid attention to, the pink and ruffles one. Softly asks, “What banner?”

“Yours, sugar lips,” Logan grins out. “Wallace here forgot that the pithy business card motto of Veronica Mars is ‘Someone Always Has to Pay’. So we were coming up with banner slogans.”

Vee shuffles over to him, slides in between Logan and himself, and Weevil realizes that they’re in the same formation they always hold during lunch. Like Mac and Wallace are the bridge between their fucked up selfs and normal. “Logan, you know the ‘someone always pays’ isn’t a motto. It’s a life philosophy.”

“And one you do very well living by, Vee,” Wallace interjects.

She smirks at him, and Weevil watches a little of the old Veronica slip back. “You know it. Nothing like some good old fashioned revenge to soothe the weary mind.”

“That should be the book you write, Bond. ‘Retribution for the Jaded Soul’. It’ll be a hit,” Mac interjects.

The two who aren’t jumping in are the two who haven’t witnessed Vee absolutely destroy someone in a fit of self-righteousness. He’s pretty sure she hasn’t accused them of any wrong-doing either. In fact, they look more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of these sort of dealings. That’s alright, though, because the two he’s worried about are laughing and joking. Wallace walks over and slings his arm over her shoulder, and the two of them are off in a world of private jokes he doesn’t know and a shared history he and the others aren’t a part of. It looks like Mac is trying to explain Neptune to the others, who have never had even the crash course. He spares a glance for Echolls, who watches the goings on from afar. Wanders over to him, since everyone else seems adequately occupied with things he doesn’t want to begin discussing. 

“Hey, man,” he greets. “How are you holding up in a room with your ex and hers?”

Logan shrugs. “It’s fine.” Turns and looks at him. “You did a good thing.”

Weevil doesn’t give anything away. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t.” Logan smiles. “It’s good for her.”

“Yeah,” he answers back. “Vee deserves to hang with her friends.”

“Not really what I was talking about, Weevs,” Logan tells him, patting him on the back. Pauses. “You know, I used to be so worried that she’d wake up and just realize I wasn’t good enough for her.” Laughs, kicks at nothing on the floor. “Don’t know why I’m telling you this. Anyway, she never really left.”

Weevil turns and stares at the guy. “What are you saying to me?”

Logan shrugs again. “I don’t really know. Just something I thought you needed to hear.”

“About your relationship?”

If he had to categorize the look Logan’s giving him right now, it would probably fall under the ‘damn, are you dumb’ heading. “No. About her. She always looks like she’s running, right? But she never really leaves.”

He nods, and stands in fairly companionable silence with Echolls. He’s never really thought about it before. But that’s probably the best description of the girl he’s ever heard.


	16. Chapter 16

The call comes in that one of the lecture halls is blasting heat, instead of the regulated heat it’s supposed to be letting off. Weevil gets sent out, because, apparently, he’s the only one who knows how to fix the damn things and he showed his hand last year. It turns out that the standing operating procedure among most of the other people of his crew is to feign incompetence in the realm of most maintenance work in most cases, and then do the bare minimum on the rest. He hates the lot of them.

He hates them more when he finds himself standing in front of one of the more beautiful women he’s ever seen. 

“I don’t know how it happened,” she’s telling him. “I swear, I just turned on the lights, and then *whoosh* - hot air. And it hasn’t stopped since.”

It’s hard to speak when it feels like his tongue is taking up his entire mouth. “You know, I’m betting the one doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”

“You think?” She leans in. “This is my first semester teaching here,” she confides. “I’m just really nervous. I don’t want to screw anything up, you know?”

“Well,” he says confidently, “I’ll see what I can do to fix it.”

Eighteen minutes, some pretty impressive swearing, and a torn uniform later, the full blast of the heat is off. “There. Heat’s off. It should should come on fine now, and turn off after thirty, forty-five minutes or so, but just give us a hollar if it doesn’t. They’ll send me back out to fix it.”

“Thank you so much! I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been able to fix it. There’s no possible way I could have given a lecture with that on. The students drop off as it is.”

“Yeah,” he snarks. “It’s all that drinking and partying. It really wears a person down.”

She laughs, and he can feel the blush starting to creep up his cheeks. “Well, I would love to give you a stellar review. Do you do that here? I honestly don’t know.”

He shrugs. “Couldn’t hurt. Just call the maintenance office. Ask for Phil.”

“And you are?” the woman asks, pen and paper in hand.

“We - Eli.” He coughs. “Navarro.” Maybe he’ll just ask Veronica to get him a new name all together. Something he can make someone new out of. She smiles at him.

“Well, Eli, it was a pleasure meeting you.”

“You too.” He awkwardly nods his head toward the door. “I gotta get back, so, have a good one.”

He mentions the whole ‘new name’ thing to Veronica over dinner, as a passing fancy. Kind of something for them both to chuckle over, and then move on. She runs with it, like he should have known she would. 

“What name would you want?” she asks him gleefully. “Oh, how about Rico? Last name Suave? No, how about Joseph? Oh! I’m naming you Al! It’s perfect!”

“What’s wrong with you?” He pauses. “What’s so perfect about Al? It’s a horrible name.”

She doesn’t lose her grin, and starts to sing, “If you be my bodyguard, I can be your long lost pal! I can call you Betty, and Betty when you call me, you can call me Al!” He continues to just stare. She gestures to him with her fork. “You called me Betty once. I mean, I was on a case and it was the name of my perky and sweet persona, but you did. And you crashed with me because you needed my awesome might, AKA my zipcode, to keep whoever was after you away.”

“You’re completely loco. Absolutely crazy,” he tells her. “You have a pretty nice voice though.”

“Thanks, Al,” she responds cheerfully.

He sighs. “Oh, no. Is this really going to be how it is?”

“Yeah. At least until I get bored.”

“Alright, Betty. We’ll see how this plays.”

She takes to his ‘new’ name like cooked spaghetti thrown against a wall. The worst of it is that he starts actually responding when she calls him it. 

He’s walking along with one of the only maintenance guys he likes to go do a two man job replacing all the light bulbs in the corridor of one of the halls when he hears, “Hi Al!” and he whips around immediately to find her.

She’s jogging past him, grinning from ear to ear. He doesn’t even scowl any more. “Nice to see you too, Betty,” he yells after her.

Mike stares. “Your name is Al?”

Weevil rolls his eyes. “No, it’s just a joke. She’s a friend of mine.”

Mike doesn’t stop staring. “Is her name Betty?”

“No, it’s Veronica.”

“What’s the joke?”

Weevil pauses. Tries to think about how to summarize Vee, and names, and the whole bit into one easily understandable sentence. Or paragraph. “It’s kind of hard to explain,” he finds himself apologizing.

“No, man, don’t worry. Inside joke. It’s cool. My wife calls me Matilda, so I get it.”

Weevil’s not sure if Mike does get it; or, if Mike does get it, whether he himself wants it. It’s not until later, when they’re loading up the dead bulbs and preparing them for the trash that he realizes what Mike means. What having an in-joke means. He grins. Mike, covered in the grime of the day, is less pleased. 

“What gives, man? What’s with the dopey smile?”

“Nothing.” Weevil puts the load gingerly in the box. “Just happy.”


	17. Chapter 17

There are times when living with Veronica Mars isn’t all Weevil’s made it out to be. Times like when he walks in from a hard day’s work, and finds Echolls and Vee having it out in front of the couch he’d called on the little sheet they created after an incident that hadn’t but nearly ended in bloodshed where she wanted to watch some girlie movie, and he wanted to watch a soccer game.

He’s waving his arms around and yelling something about some new case she’s working on, and she’s yelling back at him, and he’s just trying to ignore them both in the time it takes him to sneak around the chaos and make it to the relative safety of his room. It’s not working. They’re circling each other like cage fighters. Weevil is on edge, feels his skin tingling. And when Echolls moves toward Vee, he steps in the middle. 

“You might want to take a step back,” he tells Echolls, and it’s like the other guy deflates. Turns and looks at Vee with sad eyes, and Weevil wants to roll his own.

“I thought it would be different, you not living with your dad any more,” Echolls tells her. “But it turns out you just substituted one guy who’ll be your bodyguard for another when it comes to me.” Throws his hands up, and turns to walk out.

“Logan, wait,” Vee pushes past him. “I didn’t ask Weevil to step in. I didn’t want him to step in.”

Echolls whirls around. “Does it matter? It’s still always going to happen. All I care about is you, and you staying safe. And all they care about is that I’m some fuck up who’s going to hurt you. Where does that get fair, Veronica? When do they start to stop and ask why I’m mad at you? When do you stop being their golden girl who can do no wrong? Because it’s getting a little old.”

Veronica’s mouth hangs open, and she shakes her head. Echolls nods at her, looking mad and sad and resigned, and continues toward the door. “Don’t walk away!” Vee looks near tears, and Weevil starts feeling like he’s stepped into a mess he didn’t know existed, as opposed to all those messes he knows and all the messes he has strong suspicions about. “You said - you promised - we weren’t going to do this any more.”

“Yeah? Well, you promised to stop taking these unnecessary risks,” he counters, but he’s stopped. 

“This isn’t an unnecessary risk!” She sounds desperate and pleading, and Weevil prays to the God he’s not sure is merciful or kind or just to make sure she never has cause to sound like this again. Because he’s not even in love with her, and it’s breaking his heart. He doesn’t look to Echolls, because he doesn’t want to see if it’s breaking his. “I needed to do it, for my case. I needed the information!”

“You shouldn’t be taking these cases!” Echolls shoots back. “If it ends up with you locked in the trunk of a car, you shouldn’t be taking them!”

Weevil pauses, hates to step in, but does. “You got locked in the trunk of a car?”

Veronica spares him a glance. “Yes, I did. It wasn’t fun. But,” she turns back to Logan, “it wasn’t deadly either. And it wasn’t the first time. It’s not like I know how these things are going to play out when I take a new client. She said it was just normal surveillance.”

“But you never ask!” Logan steps closer again, and Weevil resists the impulse to shove him into a wall and hold him there. Because Logan’s wrong; he doesn’t hate the guy, doesn’t even think of him as a fuck up, much, any more. He even likes Echolls, about half the days. But the specters of Lilly’s bruises cover Veronica in moments like this, and he’ll be damned if he lets anything hurt her when he could have stopped it. “You trust what they have to say to you like you know them, and the people you know you don’t trust at all.”

Weevil hates to think it, but that part rings true. Veronica’s mouth falls open again, and then she shuts it. “I have to take what they say on face value, until I have some reason to think otherwise. They’re paying me, Logan.”

“And me? You don’t trust what I say at all.” 

“I do.” Her voice breaks. “I do trust you.”

Echolls laughs a bitter laugh, and Weevil places odds on the situation diffusing enough for him to sneak off to his room without worrying about Vee. “You don’t. You never have.”

“That’s not true! I trust you. I just need to prove that I can.”

“Trust isn’t about proof, Veronica. If you need proof, it isn’t trust.” Her mouth twists into something heartwrenching, and Logan backs toward the door. “I don’t know what we’re doing here.”

“I do,” she tells him quietly. “I know. Can you believe me that I know?”

Logan stops again. Looks upward, and then back at her. “I don’t know, Ronica. I think I need some proof.”

Weevil’s not sure if he means that maliciously, but Veronica looks like she’s going to be sick. They both are staring at her. He doesn’t know what Echolls is thinking, but he’s wondering how he has gotten to a place in his life where he’s willing to run out and buy some sappy movies and more ice cream than the human stomach can handle if this is going to go down the way it looks like it’s going down. He wonders what other guys who are twenty do with their Thursday nights, because he may be living wrong. Vee straightens up, and stares at the other guy. “I love you.”

The effect that has is profound. Weevil is definitely coming down on the side of he should have run for his room minutes ago, because Echolls looks like a whole new man at that pronouncement. He crosses the tiny living room in about three steps and scoops her up, and kisses her long and deep. Weevil feels like he’s accidentally walked into a sitcom, because he’s once again trapped, with his room being blocked by two people in their own world. He attempts to push them gently, and is rebuffed. He nudges Vee a little in the side, and is ignored. He is strongly considering just walking back out the door, but he doesn’t really have anywhere else to go.

“I love you,” Echolls is murmuring, “I love you so much.”

Veronica responds in force, and they fall back toward the couch. Weevil makes tracks to his room, and closes the door. He hears noises that sound suspiciously like sex coming through, and turns on his music as loud as he can risk without upsetting the neighbors. Thinks about that couch, how he’s sat on that couch, how he’s slept on that couch. Shakes his head. Tomorrow, he decides, he’s going to take some of that industrial cleaner from work. Give it to Vee, have her scrub the thing down.

The next morning, Echolls greets him in the kitchen, chipper as can be. Weevil gives him a long look and moves toward the coffee pot.

Veronica wanders in toward them, and turns pink when she sees him. “Sorry about that, Weevil.”

He glares at her. “Yeah? I sit on that couch, Vee. I slept there.”

Her blush deepens. “Really, really sorry.”

“I’m not that sorry,” Echolls cuts in. “I had a great time.”

They both turn and glare at him. “Don’t you have class?”

“Hmm...” He gives Vee a little smile, runs his fingers down her face and pulls her in for a kiss. “I’m going.”

Vee watches him go, and then turns back. “So... How was your evening?”

“I spent it huddled in my room instead of watching the tv I had reserved.”

“If it’s any consolation at all, I didn’t watch tv either,” she tells him in all seriousness. He laughs.

“Yeah?” She nods, and blushes a bit more. “Want to tell me what got Echolls all riled up?”

Her eyes widen. “I don’t want to talk about that with you.”

Weevil can feel his forehead wrinkle. Realizes what she thinks he’s asking. “No! Before that. How did you get locked in a car trunk? And how did he know about it?”

She sighs. “This girl in one of my classes, Manda, she wanted me to follow her boyfriend for a while. She thought he was cheating. Well,” she reflects, “she told me the guy was her boyfriend. And she told me she thought he was cheating. But it turns out, they’re both running contraband and are rivals. She wanted the pictures so she could take them to the head of Student Affairs and have him removed from campus so she would be the only game in town. I figured it out, went to confront her, and ended up in her trunk because she’s got guys who make you look like a dweeb working for her.”

“Damn, girl,” he puffs out. “No wonder Echolls went out of his gourd.” 

She glares at him. “I was fine. They didn’t even take my phone. I called Logan to come get me out after they abandoned the car, and I’m turning in the evidence I collected on both of them to Student Affairs.”

“Vee,” he starts, “I’m not saying Echolls is right about everything. But Wonder Woman, you ain’t. You’re not even Cat Woman. You got a taser and a smart mouth, and that’s enough a lot of the time. But maybe you should think about calling one of us for back up the other times.”

She huffs at him. “And what if Logan and I aren’t together in six months, and I’ve gotten used to having him around? What if you up and leave one day, and I got dependent on the idea that you’re going to come when I call? I can’t, Weevil. I need to be able to do this myself, because that’s who I have.”

“You’re an idiot if you think Echolls won’t always say how high when you ask him to jump, no matter what. And you’re a bigger idiot if you think I’m going to walk out on you,” he tells her. “Get used to it Vee - you got people. Sometimes they’re going to be mad at you and sometimes they’re not going to want to be around you, because you’re a hard ass. But don’t tell me that any one of us isn’t going to be here when you ask. And even if that’s not true, you know I’m gonna be here. We do each other favors, right? That’s how we roll.”

“Is it?” Her eyes turn flinty. Weevil clenches his jaw. “How many favors do I owe you, hombre? How many do you owe me?”

“Bitch to me as much as you want, Vee. Doesn’t make it not true.”

“You think it’s that easy? Some words and I’m cured?” she sneers. “It’s not.”

“You know, I liked it better when you just accused me of stealing crap,” he tells her. “because this isn’t even a thing. I got work. You want a ride to campus or not?”

She looks chastened, nods. “Yeah.”

She gnaws on her lip the way to the car. Sighs as she pulls her seatbelt toward her. Weevil waits. “I don’t think you’re going to leave.”

“Yeah, you do,” he contradicts. “And you know what Vee? That’s fine. I’m not your boy, there. I don’t need anything from you. I like you fine the way you are. Just, put that aside when you’re going to be fucking with powerful people. Got it?”

She turns to him. “How did you get so smart, Weevs?”

He grins at her. “Well, I don’t trust you a whole lot either, so that helps.” She laughs. “I get it. You get burned enough, you don’t want to touch anything looking like flame.”

“I do trust you, you know. I just get all messed up.”

Weevil smiles. It’s good to hear, even when he’s not sure if it’s true. Even when some days, he’s convinced it’s not. It feels like they’re both working toward something, though. To the day when they do actually actively trust each other. And that’s enough.


	18. Chapter 18

Weevil starts going to church on the regular. He’s not sure why. It isn’t like he doesn’t have problems with the Church, doesn’t know a soul who was raised Catholic who doesn’t, but sitting there on Sundays in his best clothing makes him feel like a different type of man. The first couple of times, he went back to his neighborhood; but he could feel the side-eye from everyone in the building, as if he didn’t deserve to be allowed back in the sacred halls. He sat with his family those first few Sundays, and after the service most of the other patrons stepped around the Navarro clan.

So, he scouts out a new church. It isn’t like it’s hard. It isn’t like there aren’t half full pews just waiting for a wayward lamb to return to the flock. But it rankles all the same. He drags Vee with him to a couple as he looks for the new place to cleanse his soul, and she complains bitterly the whole way until they’re seated. And then, every Sunday he makes her come, she sits in rapt silence. 

They don’t talk about it, in the hours they spend outside the walls of the churches. He doesn’t think he needs to. He doesn’t know what she is, if she’s anything. Sometimes he doesn’t know what he is, either, so that’s fine. Half the time, after the shit he’s seen and the shit he’s done, he’s not sure if there is anything to pray to. Or, if there is, if He is worthy of praise and love. Half of that half of the time, he’s convinced he only feels that way because he’s afraid there are stains on his eternal soul that can’t come clean. Those are the times he thinks those in the old neighborhood have the ability to see his sins, inked on him the same way his tattoos are. Because he knows all about the faith, knows that in order to be absolved of one’s sins, the sinner has to be repentant. And he’s not. He’s not proud of what he’s done; pride goeth before the fall, and all that. He accepts it; he accepts the fact that he created the conditions for a man to die, because Jesus may believe in turning the other cheek, but he lives in a world where an eye for an eye is still the law of the land.

He knows this about himself, and yet he’s still drawn to those doors. He still studies the Stations of the Cross with awe, thinking about the strength of this one man to do these deeds and to not feel any desire for vengeance or hatred while performing them. He likes losing himself in the stained glass. He likes becoming one part of a whole when they answer the priest’s call with, “And also with you”. The time he spends in the Church is time he thinks he could follow the example of Jesus Christ. More than that, it is time he is following his example. He lives by the Word inside the doors, and slips back into his old skin the second he walks out of them. He mentions this bit of it to Vee one of the Sundays he cajoles her into joining him as they drive back to the apartment, his head still full of the grace of God and his nose still full of incense. She turns to him, eyes deep like the sea.

“I think living is the most courageous thing any of us can do. I can’t see any lesson worth taking from voluntarily going to slaughter without a fight.”

He still feels foggy from the atmosphere of the sermon. “You don’t find it amazing he was able to do that? That he could let everything go?”

She doesn’t turn away from him. “I think that it’s Godly. But I’m not.”

He lets that rattle about his head. When he parks, he turns to her. “You know, you make a lot of sense sometimes.”

She smiles faintly at him, and walks the short path. Explains, “You know, a while ago, I wanted to be better. I heard a guy once, a reverend, talk about anger as being something that makes us less. And I thought about it, and I made a short but concerted effort to be all zen about life.” She opens their door. “But I like being angry. I like feeling passionate and alive, and I love making people who thought they were untouchable hit the ground hard.”

He understands that, sometimes too well. Tells her that. She plops herself down on the cleaned couch. Smiles up at him. 

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to aspire to it, Eli.” He starts, not used to his given name on her lips, as opposed to his chosen one.

He shuffles forward, trying to figure out how to put what he’s thinking into words. Ends up with, “I don’t.”

She crosses her legs, leans into the cushions so she’s still facing him. He sees her do it peripherally, but keeps his focus on the far wall. “Okay.”

“I mean, I want to want that, you know? When I’m in there, when it’s flowing over me, I want to be what’s being asked of me. But then I leave, and it’s like I’m exiting a dream. It feels good to carry with me, but it’s just...” He shrugs. It’s something he’s thought about for a long time; it’s one of the reasons he stopped going with any sort of regularity once he got old enough to make that decision. It’s something he’s never voiced before, though, worried about getting cuffed in the ear or looked at with a horror that can only come from someone who knows she's looking at one of the damned. “I admire him, is all. I admire the ideal.”

She pushes herself up onto her knees, and wraps her arms around his shoulders. Hugs him good and tight. He knows she doesn’t see the sins. She just sees him. “Let me know when you want me to go with you,” Veronica pledges, “and I’ll be happy to admire the ideal with you.”


	19. Chapter 19

In a gambit designed to allow herself a safety net, Veronica wheedles Weevil into accompanying her to a party being held in Wallace and Piz’s room. He’s not exactly thrilled with the situation, especially since it’s a work night. Which he tells her.

“We won’t stay too long,” she promises, eyes shining up at him like he holds the universe in his hands.

Weevil groans. “Where’s Echolls? Shouldn’t he be playing escort?”

“Logan’s not too into going to these parties,” Veronica tells him quietly.

Weevil gets it, but has to needle her, saying, “Didn’t know there was a party he isn’t a fan of.”

Veronica gives the softest glare he’s seen, and asks, “So, will you come?”

It’s sad that he feels chuffed at having even been asked, that’s how pathetic his life has been lately. Work, home, hanging with Vee, sleep. Repeat. Going out, even to a college party he’ll most likely be cleaning the remanent of the next morning, shouldn’t be this exciting.

But he puts on his nicer jeans, because he doesn’t want to look slovenly and doesn’t want to fuck up his nicest pair, and heads out with a stunning Veronica.

“Showing the ex what he’s missing?” he chortles, letting his eyes slide over her. “Or showing the current what he is?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she slings back airily as she affixes an earring while walking. “This is what normal twenty year olds wear out to a party.”

“Yeah,” Weevil acknowledges. “But you aren’t normal, and you don’t dress like this. Unless it’s for a case.” He stops. “I’m not back up on a case, am I? Because Vee, you gotta clear these things in advance.”

She scowls, but it isn’t like this isn’t a valid concern, so he refuses to be cowed. They stand there glaring at each other for a couple of seconds more before she breaks. “No. I’m just - promise you won’t say anything.”

Weevil throws her a look. “Vee, who am I going to tell?”

“Parker’s going to be there. And she’s gorgeous, and bubbly, and sweet, and she’s my friend so I shouldn’t want to, but -”

There are things that Veronica usually doesn’t do, and one of those things is babble. So Weevil cuts her off. “But she dated your boyfriend in an off period and you want to show you’re hot stuff too.”

She flushes. “Yeah.” Looks up at him. “I’m a bitch, right?”

Weevil shrugs. “Yeah. But in general, not because of this.” 

She snorts. “Good to know.”

So, they go to campus, and they’re walking to Fennel’s room, when the beautiful professor from the Heater Incident, as he thinks of it, walks into them. She smiles in recognition, and Weevil is in kind of a panic.

“Eli!” She smiles wider. “I put in that call with your management.”

“Yeah,” he mumbles as he rubs the back of his neck, wishing he’d gone with his nicest pair of jeans. “Thanks.”

He doesn’t want to look at Veronica, because he can feel her eyes on him. Knows she’s cataloging every little detail of this woman for later. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye. She is watching surreptitiously, smirking a bit, and he wants to kick her shins for any number of reasons. She coughs, and the professor turns to see her standing there.

“Oh! I’m so sorry. I’m Professor Cassidy. You must be Eli’s girlfriend.”

Weevil gives a little cough that’s more like a choke, and Veronica’s smirk gets swallowed by the fake smile she has that would be real on anyone else. “Oh, no. I’m just a friend of Eli’s. I’m dragging him out tonight. He just works so much.”

Professor Cassidy smiles back. “Ah, well, I shouldn’t keep you. I’m heading toward home myself. It was wonderful to run into you.”

He nods. “Yeah.” Curses himself for not being more together; curses himself all the more for not being more together in front of Veronica. She gives him one last smile and walks off the way they just came from. He refuses to look at Vee.

“Weevil!” She proclaims gleefully. “You’re blushing.”

He can feel it. “Shut up.”

“Never thought I’d see the day when Weevil Navarro had a problem talking to a lady friend.” He watches her shake her head at him out of the corner of his eye and manages not to push her over. “What is the world coming to?” Vee whirls and grabs his arm. “Who is she?”

He can feel his blush deepen, and it just isn’t fair because he hasn’t done this in years. He wants to know where his machismo has gone, because he doesn’t have it. “Just a professor. I fixed the heat in her room.”

“And you’re so embarrassed of me in this get up you thought you could get away with not introducing us?” she teases. He shrugs. Because she’s crazy intuitive, Veronica figures out what that means. “Seriously? You’re all gaga over this woman and you didn’t even know her name?”

“I wasn’t paying attention to the ticket, alright? It wasn’t like I knew that was waiting for me,” he growls. “Most professors around here are old, ugly, or both.”

“Want to talk about it?” He glances over. She looks genuine.

“What’s there to talk about? She’s gorgeous. I go stupid when I see her. There’s nothing there but that.”

Veronica’s smirk returns. “Alright. No girl talk. Want to get your drink on, see if you can score with some moderately attractive college co-eds?”

“Now, you’re speaking my language.”

She loops her arm through his and they make their way to Fennel’s, Veronica taunting and teasing him every step of the journey. She sticks close, at first, once they’re inside, her usual bravado failing her. He gives her a little nudge.

“Go,” he tells her. “Have some fun.”

She nudges him back. “How do you know I’m not having fun standing next to you?”

“Go,” he says again, “so I can have fun.” She glances up at him, her forehead lined in confusion. “I’m not going to get any if you’re hanging around me looking like you do.”

“Eli Navarro,” she sing songs. “Was that a compliment?”

He rolls his eyes. “You’re smoking. Go off and be smoking near some other guy. Ruin his night instead of mine.”

She bumps him with her shoulder as she wanders away, and he watches her leave. Watches her until she makes it to Fennel’s side, and watches as Fennel makes a hand motion and then shake his head. He can only imagine what that’s about. 

He loses sight of her for a little bit as he slides through the crowd, so when he feels someone at his elbow, at first he assumes it’s her. Instead, there’s another blonde. Weevil thinks about leaving California for a hot second, just to get away from them. Blondes have been nothing but trouble.

“Hi,” this one draws out. “How’s your night going?”

“Better now that you found me,” he drawls, letting his eyes walk up and down her body. She smiles prettily. 

“Want to get a drink?”

He grins, lets her lead the way. The blonde - Ashlee - is flirting and fun, and only the littlest bit dull. He’s used to his blondes having some edges, and Ashlee is as soft as down. She talks a good game, but he’s probably the farthest she’s ever stepped into danger. And he’s not that dangerous, not anymore.

He pauses for a second in the marathon of innuendo and lips to search out for his blonde, and Ashlee notices when he finds her. “Who is she?”

Weevil watches Veronica dance with Fennel and Mac, and smiles. “A friend.”

“How good a friend?” Ashlee asks as she presses herself against him. He throws his arm around her waist.

“A good one,” he tells her. “One of the best I’ve ever had.”

Ashlee glances at her again before returning her attention solely to him. “So, you want to come to my room?”

He grimaces. “I want to, so bad. But I’m my friend’s ride.”

She smiles at him. “We could be back before you had to leave.”

He lets his eyes get hot, and pulls her in for another kiss. “Yeah,” he sighs into her ear. “That’s a plan.”

He’s not really sure how to let Vee know he’s going to go and come back, so he settles for catching her eye and doing a head nod as Ashlee leads him to the door. She and Wallace sidle up to them in record time. 

“We’ll be back,” Ashlee giggles at her, and Veronica nestles into Wallace’s side.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t,” she commands. He can feel his grin getting predatory.

“I guarantee you, I will be doing plenty more,” he shoots, making it as dirty as possible in attempt to redeem himself from the earlier failure. She blushes hard.

“Or do that,” she croaks out. “Wallace, let’s boogie.”

Wallace grins at him and follows back to the center of his room. Ashlee is warm and soft in his arms, and he lets everything fall away as she leads them blindly to her door. This, he thinks, is a good night. He might have to join Vee more often, if this is how it’s going to end.

The next morning, he’s bleary eyed and she’s dragging. But he feels alive. Voracious. Happy. Veronica notices and growls a “What are you so thrilled about?” at him. He hands her a cup of coffee.

“Last night,” he tells her, and her eyes widen.

“I don’t want to know.”

“Good, because I’m not going to tell you.” He grins down into his mug. “Just, I got my mojo back.”

Vee hands him a bowl and his cereal. “Glad you had a good time.”

He misses the boys in moments like this, when he could lay it on thick and talk about the girls he fucks without running into some sort of barrier he didn’t even realize was there. But, on the whole, being allowed to just be is its own reward. Having someone other than his grandmother buy him cereal because he likes it is its own joy. Not talking about Ashlee and what he did with her is a small price to pay in return.


	20. Chapter 20

Echolls is leaning against his crappy car. Weevil stops walking toward it, and shakes out his head like it’s just some optical illusion he can bat away. But no. When he’s done, Echolls is still leaning against his crappy car.

He doesn’t know why. Hasn’t seen Echolls since that morning after the night of his and Vee’s big fight and make up, and hasn’t missed the guy either. Echolls rolls his head lazily, and catches sight of him, and Weevil stands up a little straighter, tries to walk a little taller.

When he gets close enough for talking, Echolls pushes himself off and stands straight himself. “Buy you a drink?”

He shrugs. One guy’s money is as good as another’s, and it isn’t like this particular guy doesn’t have more than enough to spare. “Sure.” He can’t help it, he can’t, when he follows that up with, “Let me just tell our girl I’m going to be late coming home.”

It’s a dig he knows will find its way in, and he looks forward to the little flinch. Echolls just shrugs, though, and Weevil feels a bit more off kilter about this drink than he wants to. “Fine; but if she tracks us down, she’s buying her own drinks.”

The snort bubbles up completely without Weevil’s permission. He hates when he finds Echolls funny. Even though they’re moving toward something like an understanding, even though he doesn’t hate the guy most of the time, even though he likes the guy half of the time, Echolls being funny is something he resents. Has always resented. Guy that much of an asshole probably has to be funny, but it’s just one more tool in Echolls’ arsonal and Weevil thinks he’s got enough of those already.

Echolls grins a triumphant sort of grin, and continues. “But you’re driving.”

When they slide into the car, Weevil says, “I’m surprised you’d let yourself be seen riding around in something that doesn’t cost more than someone’s house.”

“I’m trying to grow as a person,” Logan responds with just a touch of arrogance. Weevil lets it go.

He pulls into the bar he frequents most, and Echolls just gets out and stretches like he belongs there too. It grates, in a way it doesn’t when Veronica does it, that Echolls thinks the world is his oyster and that there’s nowhere that shouldn’t house him and be grateful for the opportunity to do so. It grates, because he’s never been able to do that, be that. It’s just one more example of how much farther down he is in the world, just by virtue of what he is. It’s just one more example of how much further he has to climb than Echolls ever does.

He follows Echolls in, and doesn’t miss the slight sneer that skips across his lips before he finds an empty table. Weevil feels some of the older men’s glares digging into his back, and he knows exactly why he’s getting them. He’d be glaring, too, if some asshole other than him brought an 09er to the bar people go to in order to complain about the 09ers. 

Weevil orders the drinks, Echolls pays. He shoots the first shot back like water. Weevil follows suit.

“So.” He looks at Echolls expectantly. Echolls just grins and takes a long time with his beer.

He puts down the glass and raises his eyebrows, and Weevil is unamused. “So?”

“What are we doing here?”

Echolls leans out and onto the wall behind the stool. “You’re the one who brought me here, cholo. I was thinking something along the wharf, myself.”

“Why did you want to buy me a drink?” Weevil continues, not allowing Echolls to swerve around the conversation.

The guy shrugs. “You know what I’ve been doing lately?”

Weevil shakes his head. “No idea, but if it has anything to do with people who wear skirts, then it’s going to take more than a drink to buy my silence.”

Echolls looks reprovingly at him. “Thought I told you, when I’m with Veronica, there’s no one else.” Spins the beer glass. “It’s good to know you can be bought, though.”

Weevil doesn’t feel the least bit apologetic for the allusion to his impropriety. “Just saying.”

“Well, don’t.” Logan’s grin turns satisfied. “I’ve been on stake outs. I’ve been filing. I’ve been getting the low down on the dirt. And it’s really boring.”

“So,” he has to ask because he still doesn’t get it, “why are we here?”

“I don’t know what you said to her,” Logan tells him, eyes shining with sincerity, “but whatever it was, she’s bringing me with her more. I get text messages on meeting times, and when. I get messages when they’re done. She’s - she’s not rushing headlong into some crap anymore.”

Weevil is a little stunned. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Echolls says. “So, you know, thanks.”

“Don’t thank me too much. I just told her you’d jump as high as she told you to.”

Echolls ducks his head a bit, scrunches down on his stool. “Yeah. I would. I’ve been trying to tell her that for years. She doesn’t believe me.” Weevil watches as his eyes focus on a point on the wall. “But she does believe you. So, thanks.”

He doesn’t know where to go from here. Doesn’t know how to get them back on solid ground. There was something at least consistent about an Echolls that resented him, and an Echolls he resented and loathed. He presses further down this new path. “Didn’t figure you would be too happy about it, that she believes me over you.”

“I’m not,” the guy tells him, still not looking at him. “I hate it. But still. This isn’t about me. It’s about her. I just want her safe.”

His earlier words float back around Weevil. “Growing as a person?” He hazards a guess.

Logan’s smile this time is empty of all mirth. “Yeah, but not about this. This is something else.” 

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Weevil says, and he’s just as worried about the fact that he’s bonding with Echolls over concern about Vee as he is about anything else in his life, but there it is. “She’s not superman. So why does she think she is?”

He looks at Weevil full on, and Weevil’s a little unnerved by his intensity. “She got hurt,” Echolls says vaguely, and Weevil knows there’s a story here no one’s telling. “It wasn’t just one thing. But - I think she doesn’t want to admit she can get hurt again, like that.” 

He shrugs, and the intensity dissipates. “But I don’t know, man, that’s just babble from the psych class that’s fulfilling like three core requirements.”

Weevil breathes out. “You hurt her.” He says it as a statement, but he means it as a question.

“Yeah, I did.” Echolls points to him. “But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.”

Not exactly what he’s talking about. Weevil revolves that sentence in his head a couple more times. It’s part of this mystery, this underlying pulse to her, and to Echolls, that tugs at him. Echolls gives away more than Vee ever would think to. And here it is again. Echolls could be looking to absolve himself from some blame, but he doesn’t really do that with Vee. So. Not like how Echolls hurt her.

Before he gets too far down that line of thought, Echolls bangs the table. “Stop thinking so much,” he commands. “You’re going to strain something.”

“How’d she get hurt?”

“In all the usual ways,” the guy says insincerely. “Don’t worry about it.”

He can’t help it, he can do nothing else.


	21. Chapter 21

Weevil starts his investigation the way he’s been taught - the way she taught him. He goes at it sideways. He knows better than to go to Echolls. Echolls is probably holed up somewhere or another, lambasting himself for giving Weevil this much. He doesn’t go to Fennel either. If he knows, he’s not talking. Fennel doesn’t talk about Vee to anyone, not the bad parts anyway, not that Weevil can see. He only talks about Vee to Vee, if he can help it.

This leaves only a couple of avenues. The sheriff doesn’t know, obviously. If there sheriff knew, he’d have known about it. If the sheriff knew, the town would be ripped apart. If there sheriff had an inkling, Weevil’s pretty sure the world would be burning. Because the way he feels about Vee, the way Echolls and Fennel and even Mac feel about her, pales in comparison. Still, the sheriff is a decent place to start for the timeline. For when Vee turned from the girl in the shadows to the girl willing to take on anyone to cross her path, and win.

“Eli,” Mr. Mars says as Weevil pulls open the door. “What brings you around this side of town?”

“Veronica asked me to pick up a few files for her; she wants to look through some crap.”

The older man grins congenially at him and turns back to his own files. “And you run to do her bidding, just like the rest of us schmoes. I used to think you were above that. That she hadn’t gotten to you.”

He shrugs, picks up the picture of the long haired Veronica. “She got to me a long time ago. When’d Vee cut her hair?”

The sheriff stops cold, gives him a warm smile, a questioning smile. “Why? Did she do it again?”

“Nah,” he answers, not giving too long or short a pause in between. “Just, you know, thinking back, about high school. She was this little wallflower, and then she became a spitfire. And I’m trying to remember when it happened.”

“She was never a wallflower,” the sheriff corrects. “Not around the people who knew her, anyway. And she cut her hair sometime after Christmas, I believe. When she was sixteen.”

Weevil nods. “She ever tell you why?”

He hates the look the sheriff is giving him now. It’s the look he got most frequently when the man had picked him up and put him in the back of the squad car, the look of confident searching. It’s a look that clearly communicates that something is up, and he will figure out what it is. “No. She tell you?”

He shakes his head, puts the picture back. “We never really discussed fashion back then.”

“But you do now?”

“Every once in a while she asks my opinion on a shirt, but it’s usually some tee shirt. And one is really about the same as another.”

“That’s what I tell her,” Mr. Mars exclaims in solidarity. “One stupid shirt with a saying on it is just the same as any other.”

Weevil grins. “Yeah. She’s always asking what one of ‘em says to the world at large, and I’m pretty much thinking it says whatever’s written there.”

“Exactly.” Mr. Mars moves further into the room, toward him. Gets serious. Some of the guys in the old neighborhood used to laugh about Sheriff Mars, when he was a sheriff. Talking about how he looked doughy, like he was soft. Weevil’s always known better. The guy looks harmless; but the intelligence Veronica shines out into the world came from somewhere, and it came from him. And he’s probably just as deadly as anyone Weevil’s ever met. “But Eli, if there’s something happening with my daughter beyond the usual fashion crisis, you’d tell me. Right?”

Weevil forces himself to remain as calm as he possibly can. “If there’s anything going on, you’ll know.” He pauses. “She’d tell you.”

“Right.” The sheriff is unconvinced. Weevil gathers up the files for Veronica, the ones she didn’t know she needed, and heads out.

“Good seeing you,” he calls back. The older Mars nods at his retreat.

He plots his next move. Veronica isn’t exactly the girlfriendly type, but she does have two of them. And he’s willing to bet at least one of them knows something. 

He catches them at lunch. One of the good things about skulking around campus as the hired help is the perk about being the hired help anywhere: most people don’t pay you any mind, until they have to. Even the people who know you. The only people who consistently see him when he’s working around campus, acknowledge that they see him, are Veronica and Echolls - and he’s willing to bet they do it for vastly different reasons. Because of that, he knows more about the people who orbit around Vee than anyone would guess. So, he knows who eats lunch when, and with who, in their little group.

He plops down in the chair across from Parker, next to Mac, because he and Mac get along and because the blonde makes him about as nervous as he makes her - for entirely different reasons of course. She gasps, and he grimaces. Like that one.

Mac just bites into her burger, veggie variety. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” he says, leaning back. “Just caught a break from the world of maintenance, saw you two sitting here by your lonesome.”

“Aren’t you sweet,” Mac drawls out. Parker smiles nervously. “But what’s up?”

This is why he likes Mac most out of all Vee’s friends. She’s nice, but not stupid. And not afraid to call people on their shit. So, if he’s usually not the type to hang around, he obviously has a reason for doing it now. He grins winningly at her, and she rolls her eyes. “I got a question. About Vee.”

Mac stiffens. “Shouldn’t you be asking her it, then?”

“It’s about that time, the stuff she doesn’t like to talk about.” Weevil keeps it vague. There’s a lot of times Veronica doesn’t like to talk about. All the times, actually. Pre-Lilly, post-Lilly, what happened last week; relationship drama, relationship non-drama, relationships in general. Girl’s a great poker player for a reason. But he wants to see what Mac thinks it is.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t pry.” She raises her eyebrows at him, and he thinks she wants him to give her something to hold on to. Something that will let her off the hook if she tells him what Vee wants to keep hidden.

He gives a little shrug. Looks at his folded hands. “I worry about her, you know. She’s a little off, lately.”

Mac sighs. “Are you sure this isn’t just crap with Logan? Stuff she doesn’t want to talk to you about?”

“I was under the impression they were doing good,” he says as Parker looks uneasy. “Echolls said they were doing good. Why? Do you know different?”

“No, I don’t. She normally doesn’t talk to me about this sort of stuff, emotional stuff. She’s helped me through it, but really, she just generally tells me to keep busy and carry on.” She pauses and stabs at a fry. “One time, we talked about sex and I thought we were both going to spontaneously combust from the complete mortification of it all.”

Weevil chuckles at that. “So, do you remember anything about her, before she became a badass? Maybe around the time she became a badass?”

Mac gets a wild look in her eye, and glances at Parker. Weevil notes that Parker looked strangely interested, and now chases some peas around the plate in an effort to look less so. Mac leans a bit over the table. “Why?”

“Just, a hunch, is all.”

Mac glares at him a bit, and then glares at her tray. “You’d probably know better. I wasn’t a part of any group the 09ers touched.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “But you were on the chain of gossip, even if it was just you hearing it because they thought you were invisible.”

She scrunches up her face. “Everyone talked about how obsessed she was with Duncan Kane, but I always thought they had it backwards, you know? He was always looking at her.” She shrugs. “But then again, so was Logan, so...”

Weevil nods. “Yeah.” He remembers that, eyes burning into her. He has his theories, but nothing he wants to talk about with anyone. Especially not in front of the newbies.

“That’s really all I remember. That and watching her wipe those words off people wrote on her locker all the time. And the purity test thing.”

“What purity test thing?”

Mac blushes and looks strangely proud. “You know there was that whole thing about how she... You know.” Weevil does know. Parker doesn’t, and Mac obviously wants to keep it that way. “Anyway, someone took the test as her. Scored an impossibly low number, and then it got written on her locker. For the world to see.”

“She didn’t take it.”

Mac scoffs. “Veronica? Please. If I hadn’t rigged the thing to sell tests automatically, I’d have probably flagged hers as one not to send out. Of course, so many people bought hers, I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford the Bug any other way.”

Weevil chews on his cheek, really starts to think. Before Lilly, she was the Virgin Queen of the school. Beyond reproach. Then, she was a traitor, a bitch, a social climber, but not what happened after. What happened after was something else. “Thanks.”

“Hey.” Mac catches his arm and flushes. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“Yeah, I will.”

He walks a bit away from the table, lost in thought. So lost in thought, he almost misses Parker grabbing his arm and yanking at him ineffectually to get him around a corner. 

“Come over here,” she whispers, and her eyes are bright and concerned. He follows her blindly. She lets go of him and crosses her arms. “You think there’s something wrong with Veronica?”

He almost hates lying to this girl, because it feels like lying to Bambi. Mac, Echolls, the sheriff, those people know. They know who he is and what he’s capable of, and that he’s a fucking trickster when he needs to be. This one has none of that. But it is what it is. “Yeah. I’m real worried.”

She naws at her lip. “I know something. I don’t know if it’s what’s bothering her, but -”

“But what?” He holds himself back. Doesn’t let himself get any closer. She breathes in, and then out. Psyching herself up for something. 

“No one knows,” she cautions. “I don’t even think Mac knows. At least, she’s never said anything. And Logan didn’t say anything about it either, so. But, um, I was raped, right? And she told me she was too.”

Weevil feels the floor shift. “Here?”

“No.” Parker’s big eyes plead with him. “No, she said it happened a couple years before. But, you were talking about how she went from being happy to being, well, Veronica, and I thought -”

“Thanks.” He nods at her. “Yeah. I think you’re right.”

Parker looks a little smug, like she got to solve the mystery. “Tell her that therapy absolutely helps. She should probably talk to someone about it, work through it.”

Weevil holds in the disbelieving laugh that wants to escape. Because Vee talking out her problems is the least likely thing in the known universe. She’d stab him with any kitchen instrument, sharp or not, for even suggesting it. But he tells the blonde, “I will. I just want her to be okay.”

And then leaves campus. Calls out of work for the rest of the day. Drives out to the beach. Parks, and watches the waves come in and out, in and out. But eventually, he has to go home. 

“We’re doing ramen for dinner,” Veronica calls out to him as he walks through the door. “Because I forgot to go get something else to eat today and I’m too tired to go back out. But don’t worry, it’s going to be gourmet. Peppers and everything.”

“What happened to the guy?” He’s twitching, nervous energy. He wants to hit something. Kill something. 

Her forehead crinkles, like he knew it would, because it happened years ago and he’s the only one in the room with it on the forefront of his mind, and she turns her attention away from the cutting board. “What guy?”

“Whoever hurt you.” He can’t say the word. Doesn’t want to have that word near Veronica at all. Doesn’t want to think about it touching her. Uses Echolls’ euphemism for it instead.

“You’re going to need to give me more than that,” she tells him, concentrating on her pepper. “Lots of people have hurt me.”

“Yeah?” He tightens his fist. “How many?”

“What are you -” He sees when it dawns on her. “Logan.”

“Actually, it was your girl Parker. Echolls was just the starting off point.”

Veronica wraps her arms around herself, tight. “What’d he say?”

“Just that someone had hurt you, and not like he had.” Weevil shrugs. “It wasn’t too hard to put the pieces together after that.”

“You make a fine detective, Eli Navarro. Don’t let anyone tell you different.” She’s turned away from him, mouth small, shoulders hunched. She’s closing in on herself, and he wants to do something for her, comfort her. He wants to make this better.

He moves farther into the room. “So, the guy.”

“Is dead.” She moves to the couch, doesn’t look at him. “Dove off the Neptune Grande roof. Nice dismount. Crappy landing.”  
He inhales. Casablancas. Nice enough kid, he thought. A bit of a prick, but who of the 09ers weren’t. He thinks about it. “Does Mac know?”

“No.” Veronica turns and stares him down. “No one knows.” He watches her reassess. “Well, Parker knows that it happened.”

“And Echolls.” It burns him how much this eats at him, how he thought they were comrades in arms and how Echolls has always been her primary confidante instead. “You told him.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to share with the class when you’re accusing him of doing it,” she says drily, and raises her eyebrows at his reaction. Clearly, he doesn’t know all there is to know about them and their relationship. He’d have thought he’d have gotten that memo by now. “What, didn’t expect that?”

“Why would you -”

She groans. “Are we really going to do this, Eli? Fine. I was drugged. It was a party. He was there. It was when he hated me, and when I was persona non grata, so, basically, I had no leads and no way in. And then we - and I thought he might have done it. Because he had GHB. And because he liked hurting me so much, for months. He didn’t, and he was there for me after.” She pauses and then continues. “He was exactly what I needed, after. And then, when I got the real answer, he was the guy who came to my rescue. Logan knows, because Logan was there.”

“Is that it?” He means it about Echolls, if that’s the only reason. If she would have held it tightly to her if he just hadn’t been there at the right place at the right time, or if she would have sought him out eventually anyway. She goes in a different direction.

“You tell me.” Her eyes are hard, her jaw tight. It wouldn’t take a genius to tell she doesn’t want to talk about it.

“I was just surprised, is all,” he says in lieu of apologizing. “Hadn’t heard anything about it before.”

“What, and you wanted to know why it wasn’t reported?”

He scoffs at her. “Damn, Vee, I know better than anyone why you wouldn’t go to the sheriff’s department.”

“I did.” She waves her hand. Question and answer time, done, at least on his end. “Why did you want to know so bad?”

He shrugs. “Because. If someone hurts you, I want to hurt them.” It’s the closest he can come to telling her she’s his family. He has to step it up. “Plus, it explains a few things about Echolls.”

“What does it it explain, exactly?” Her mouth is twisted up, like a smile; but her eyes are sharp. It doesn’t take a genius to know she doesn’t want to know. But he brought it up, so he has to see this through. He head tilts her, tries to use her own weapons against her. 

“You know, most of the time the guy doesn’t really give much of a damn about the cases you take and the risks you run. But every once in a blue moon, he gets bent all out of shape.” He sighs, fidgets a little bit. “He came to me, to thank me, you know. About you letting him in more, helping more. And that’s when he let it slip.”

She stills. “So now what? You get Logan more. You get me more? Poor little broken girl?”

“You know how many girls make it out of my neighborhood without having some fucked up shit happen to them in one way or another?” Weevil wants to know, wants to see if her goddamn criminology classes cover that, cover the crime that happens in the parts of town not well esteemed. She just watches him. He can’t read her at all right now. “You’re not poor, and you’re not broken, and you’re only little because you are. So don’t be giving me that shit.”

She pauses as she dumps the peppers in the water. “So what was all this about then?”

He walks over to her, bumps her with his shoulder. “It’s about you and me. It’s about me wanting to make things better. It’s about me wanting to make sure you’re okay.”

She sighs. “Don’t try to be my white knight, Eli. Don’t try to get in my head and figure me out. It happened, but it didn’t make me who I am, got it?”

He wraps an arm around her shoulder, squeezes her a bit. “Never thought it did."


	22. Chapter 22

She spends more time outside of the apartment than in it, after. Meals stop being shared. When she is there, she avoids his offers of rides by slipping out before he can jangle his keys. When they do manage to be in the same space for any length of time, like lunches with the gang, she folds in on herself. Becomes quiet and self-contained. He knew too much to expect anything differently, but Veronica’s forced distance wounds him in all the wrong ways. Weevil gets it, understands he pried where she would have rather he let it lie, that he violated some rule of her friendship by caring enough to do for her what she does to others out of much less benevolent reasoning.

“It wasn’t altruism.” Echolls has picked up the rope of friendship he didn’t know he’d thrown. “Don’t even try that. It was what it was.”

“And what was it?” The only reason Weevil has come to accept Echolls here is for Vee, and so he doesn’t quite know why he keeps opening the door when he knows it’s the guy on the other side when she’s gone. He guesses it’s because Echolls has a key. He can come in any time. At least this way, he feels like he has some choice in the matter.

Echolls gives one of his hapless shrugs, and Weevil glares at him before getting up to get them each another beer. “Misplaced chivalry? Loving curiosity? A burning need to solve the mystery that is Veronica Mars?”

“No.” He says it hard, and harsh. “No, man. I looked into it because -”

“It’s Veronica.”

“Yeah.”

“And she’s closed off.”

“No. That’s why you push her. I don’t get all up in arms over that shit.” He knows this, knows it’s why they work well together - as partners in crime (or justice), as friends. He takes what she’s willing to give. She does the same. And then he went beyond that with his investigation, taking more than she wanted to share. He’s been feeling the inklings of guilt about that, even when he tells himself that he was just doing what she would have. “Do you think I fucked up?”

He watches the other guy turn the bottle around, gently pulling at the label. “I think my girlfriend is avoiding us, and Parker, because she hates feeling anything less than in control. And you made her feel like she wasn’t in control. But no. It’s just who Ronnie is. You get close, and she runs from it. You go behind her back, she hates you for it.”

He winces. It’s not the first time they’ve been on the outs, but it is the first time they’re on the outs because she’s decided they are, rather than him or it being a mutual thing. He likes it better when he’s got the righteous fury at his back, whether he’s right or wrong about it. “Who’s she talking to?”

“Her dad. Wallace. I think Mac. Thanks, by the way, for getting me on the shit list.”

“My pleasure.” Echolls grins, and he can’t help it, he grins back. “Any way one of them is willing to talk to her about this?”

“Her dad doesn’t know, so he doesn’t know why, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t,” Echolls starts rattling off. “Wallace, you’d have a better chance of seeing me visit Aaron’s grave. Mac, I don’t know. Are we going to sit here drinking to the pain of having Veronica pissed at us, or are we going to actually do something with our night?”

Weevil raises his eyebrows, and Echolls slumps down in his chair.

“Yeah, alright.”

“Next time you come on over, you’d better bring your own brews.” It’s the closest he’s going to come to admitting that he and Echolls actively hang out now. That even without either one of them wanting to win points with Veronica or get tabs on Veronica, they are the kind of people who will grab a beer together.

“Oh, no, what could I possibly want more than your shit beer?” 

“Tecate isn’t shit. And if you think it is, you can get the fuck out and go to another watering hole to drown your sorrows.”

Echolls smirks at him, and looks away. Weevil thinks he’s focused on one of the pictures Vee has hanging. “Nah, I like it here. Has good ambiance, even if the company blows.”

~~~

He wakes up to someone kicking his shoe. He wants to know why he’s still wearing shoes when he’s asleep, but when he opens his eyes he finds himself facing a whole host of other questions. First and foremost being why is he on the couch when he knows for a fact he has a semi-comfortable futon for a bed. When he looks up at the person kicking him, he thinks she may be wondering the same thing.

But instead, Vee asks, “Why is Logan in my bed?”

He groans as the night comes back to him, where a bunch of beers was followed by a bunch of Street Fighter gaming and beer once Echolls saw he had it for the X-Box. 

“Why are you asking me instead of waking his ass up and asking him?” She scowls down at him, and he glances at the clock. Four in the a.m., and it’s obvious she’s just now getting home.

“I’m waking you up because I want to know what he’s doing here.”

“He’s here because he is.” Her scowl hardens. “You want something? Because I’m going to bed.”

She doesn’t answer. He stumbles up, and she slumps down. Peels off her own shoes, and pulls the blanket down from the top of the couch. Curls up, and sniffles once. He hates these moments when he doesn’t know what to say to her, when she’s as far away from him as the moon.

He turns and looks at her when he reaches the hallway, and is hit with how tiny she really is. How fragile she seems to be. It’s something that he glosses over in the day to day, when she’s full of life and energy and knowing smiles and hard eyes. He thinks he might still be drunk, because he wants to tell her that, all of it. How he thinks he was a bit in love with her, once upon a time, how he thinks she’s pretty much perfect, even though he knows she isn’t even close. Thinks she’s perfect because he knows she’s not even close. Thinks she’s perfect, even when he’s pissed at her for one thing or another. How much he hates it that she’s blocking him out of her life as easily as she is.

He’s stopped and stared for a bit too long, because she shifts and looks at him. And he’s suddenly glad for the silence this part of town has, because if they were in his old apartment or hers, he wouldn’t have the chance to hear her whispered, “I’m glad you’re still here.”

He doesn’t move toward her. He just leans a bit against the wall and answers with his own. “Where would I go?”

She shrugs and turns toward the back of the couch, dismissing him as quickly as she opened up. He feels the immediate loss of that connection before he shuffles on down the hallway. Takes off his boots, and just slides under the sheets, too tired for the rest of it.

In the morning, she’s still distant. He and Echolls are both pictures of patheticness, flopped into the same chairs they spent their night getting wasted in, Echolls making groaning moaning sounds that has Weevil wondering if he’s dying. If things were right, she’d be loud and chipper just because she could be. Would be making them miserable, just because she’d find it amusing. It’s the silence that haunts him now, that makes his headache all the worse. But she makes them coffee and hands them each a couple of aspirin and some water after popping a few slices of bread to the toaster before she disappears again. It’s not much of a peace offering, the promise of dry toast and the most minimal of care, but it’s something. And something is always better than nothing.

“She slept on the couch last night,” Echolls grumbles to him after the coffee, the water, the aspirin, and after he ate and then threw up the toast.

Weevil’s not sure he’s ready for words yet, so he just grunts. Somehow, he feels worse now than he did when Veronica woke him up at four.

“Last I saw, you were sleeping on the couch,” Echolls continues. Weevil thinks if he weren’t too messed up from last night, the guy would be poised for a fight.

“What of it?” He wants to say more, wants to explain about getting kicked and ask how the hell he got a full night’s sleep when he bogarted a bed and Weevil gets woken up even though he pays rent. But those three words were hard enough.

“Just an observation.” Echolls does his moaning groan again, letting his head flop back over the back of the chair. Weevil winces at the movement, and works to calm his rolling stomach.

“I’m gonna shower.” Three more words, and each one feels like a victory. Echolls has an arm over his eyes, and works a grunt out in the middle of his long and wordless complaint. Weevil takes that to mean he heard. Now he only has to work on the getting up and getting to the shower part of his day.

It takes more effort than he wants to admit; and once he makes it to the bathroom, he just sits there on the toilet watching the water spray down for longer than he can tell. When he finally manages to stumble into the tub, the water manages to both soothe his headache and exacerbate it all at the same time. He lets himself dry heave once, and takes a few moments for the water to slide over his body, making him feel vaguely human again after he’s spent the morning feeling like dried out and crumbling clay.

When he makes it back out to the kitchen, Echolls is in the same spot, still moaning. “She woke me up, when she came in. Wanted to know what you were doing here.”

The other guy stops for a second. “And you said?”

“To go wake you up and ask you herself.”

He watches as the other guy laughs. “Don’t do that. You’re going to make me puke again.”

“You want the shower?”

“I want to crawl into a hole and die. But I guess I’ll take the shower instead.” Echolls doesn’t move.

“It isn’t going to come to you.” 

“Shut up,” Echolls groans out, and stands unsteadily. “We need to drink more.”

“And here I was thinking this morning proved I need to drink less.” His head’s pounding has lessened until it is just a pulsing, but he rests it against the cool table anyway.

“Nope,” Echolls slurs, and Weevil wonders if the guy is still drunk. “All this proves is that my tolerance is at an all time low, and I need to get it back up again. How am I ever supposed to live up to the fucked upness of my parents if I’m not even a functional alcoholic?”

“How the fuck are you talking so much?” Weevil weakly demands, and Echolls laughs.

“Years and years of practice.”

Weevil keeps his head on the table and his eyes closed, and he realizes he’s nodded off when he feels a cool cloth get pressed against the half of his forehead not against the table. “Vee?”

“Logan’s passed out in my bed again, naked,” she informs him wryly. “I’m assuming you didn’t see that happen, because if you did I’m going to be pissed at you on a whole other level.”

He groans. “I don’t ever want to drink with him again, you hear me? Never again.”

“Don’t try to keep up next time,” she advises, and he cracks an eye open to watch her slide in to the seat across from him.

“You talking to me again for more than hi’s and bye’s?”

She grants him a small smile. “How could I not, with you two practically killing yourselves over me being - what did Logan call me? ‘A frozen, self-righteous bitch’?”

“He didn’t.”

“Oh, yes, he did. That was last night, by the way. Before I woke you up.” She taps on the table a couple of times and he grabs her hand and holds it to stop the noise. “Sorry. Anyway, I’m not exactly happy that you went digging. I’m not exactly happy that you know. It’s not something I like thinking about, and you knowing makes me think about it. And I’m tired of waiting for you to treat me differently. So, what do you want to do about it?”

He forces himself to sit up and look at her. “What are you talking about?”

Her face is pinched, her hair is down, and her bangs are blocking his view of her eyes. “I want to know how bad this is going to be.”

“Vee, I don’t - it’s me.” He doesn’t have anything else at this point than that. Doesn’t know how to answer her any other way than that.

“Are you going to keep being you?”

It comes slowly, him realizing what she’s trying to say, what she’s asking him. “Listen, I’m still pretty hung over, but I can tell you this. That doesn’t change us, okay? You’re still you.”

“Parker said you said you’d try to get me to therapy.”

“Parker is a Disney cartoon,” he replies. “I told her that because I wanted to know about you, and I didn’t want her to feel like shit for telling.”

“So nothing changes?” She’s still looking at him from behind a curtain of hair.

“Nothing changes. Not until you want it to.” She nods.

“Go sleep this off in your own bed. Don’t be drooling on my table.”

He sighs as he moves. “Why were you so pissed at Echolls, anyway?”

She glances up at him, and he’s surprised by how skittish she looks. “I just - these things are mine. They’re mine. And he just - he told you without thinking about me. About what it would do to me.”

The memory of her being taunted by Echolls for her slutty ways fights through the fog to the forefront of his mind, and he watches her shift uncomfortably in front of him. “I could never hurt you with it, okay? I wouldn’t. And damn it all if I don’t think he would either. Not anymore”

“I know.” It comes out stiffly.

“If you ever need to talk about it -”

“It happened a long time ago. I’m over it.”

It’s a lie. He doesn’t know how to call her out on it without damaging this fragile reconciliation, so he doesn’t.


	23. Chapter 23

“Do you ever wonder what the world would be if Lilly hadn’t died?”

He’s surprised, to be honest, that she’s even talking to him about this, because as far as he knows she doesn’t talk to anyone about this. Because, as far as he knows, she does her best to not talk to anyone about anything. But they’re sitting out in front of the apartment, drinking some of the beer he bought, eating the pizza she picked up on her way home, and he can’t find it in him to ask why she’s asking him.

“I don’t,” he tells her instead, because he doesn’t. He never has. Not really, anyway. Imagining that other world, well, that’s a luxury he never seemed to have, and he’d rather just live in the world he does have instead of pining over a reality that will never be.

She just sits there, slowly sipping her beer. “Can you think about it now? Where do you think you’d be?”

“Me?” He exhales, and leans back. “Jail.” He snorts as she starts. “Listen, blondie. The world wouldn’t all be sunshine and roses if Lilly Kane had lived, you know? I would have gotten busted for any number of things, and I wouldn’t have had a friendly PI willing to go the extra mile to prove me innocent.”

Veronica turns and stares at him, and for the first time since they talked about her rape, he actually gets to look her in the eye. “Me?”

“You,” Weevil confirms. “Look, I don’t know how your world would have gone. I mean, I can guess. Kane’d have taken you back at some point. You would have jet setted off to some fancy school some place, and you would have still seen Neptune as a good town to call home. But for me, my life would have fucking sucked. Think about all the crap you’ve done for me, Vee. Without your hard knock life, you wouldn’t have even known I existed. So, yeah. My life is better with you in it.”

He watches the faintest of blushes spread across her cheeks, and she shuffles over closer to him. Leans her head on his shoulder, and he almost jumps at the contact.

“I had this dream,” she tells him, “right around graduation. Lilly was alive, and I was happy. I was dating Logan, and I was going to San Diego State, and I was just - so innocent. And I just -”

“You want that.” It makes sense. It hurts, but it makes sense.

“No,” she disagrees. “There was this moment when I met up with Wallace, but I didn’t know him. I mean, if that was my perfect future, why didn’t I have Wallace?”

“I don’t know.” He drops an arm heavily around her shoulders, and she tilts further into him. This is another thing he never let himself think about, after she picked Logan. He doesn’t let himself imagine a world where he gets Veronica Mars. Because if he did, moments like this would break him. Instead, he just lets himself live in this one, where he’s probably as close to her as anyone can be. He thinks that may be what being a grown up is, not letting your fantasies destroy your reality.

“Wallace told me that it was worth it, getting taped to the flag pole.” She breathes it into his neck, and the warmth of her breath and the alcohol makes him want to stop being an adult, if only for a little while. He just grips her closer.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He watches her fingers skate across the beer label. Watches them come to an edge and start to pull. Time slips by them in the silence. “I think he’s right. It’s worth it, what happened. Because I can’t imagine a life I would want more than this one.”

He pulls away from her, so he can get a proper look at her face. She looks worn out and worn down; but there’s something else there too. It looks a bit like acceptance. “Not even a world where you get to date Duncan Kane?”

He feels her giggle rather than hear it, and she turns her face up toward his. “No. You know, I loved him. A lot. But this is better. I’m glad I know you. And I’m glad I get Wallace. I have Mac. And I love Logan.”

She says that, and she doesn’t pull away, which is the clearest indication that she doesn’t know what he wanted from her, once upon a time. That she doesn’t know why he was always doing her favors. Why he asked her to tutor him in math.

She sticks her tongue in her cheek and pulls her legs up. Pulls her head away from his shoulder and leans it against her knees. He keeps his arm around her. Keeps her nestled into his side. “Lilly would have been twenty-one this year. It’s the milestones like that that get me to thinking, you know? Lilly would have been of legal drinking age. It feels so weird to be so much older than she ever got to be.”

He knows what she means, because he has that for Lilly. But also for Felix and a bunch of the PCHers and some of the other, now dead, people in his neighborhood. The teens who were teens when he was a kid, the ones he idolized and looked up to and wanted to be like. There was a time when he would have blustered and bullshitted her. Cut her down because his experiences are so much more, because he’s had it worse. But now, sitting here with her, he just lets it go. He’s done pretending she hasn’t lost enough to join the club.

“I get you.” He pauses. “I think about Felix, like that, you know. Like, I think about the fact that I’m still breathing. I’m going with a girl, and he won’t be.”

“It’s like you’re living for two people, you and him.” This is why Vee and him are in the same club, because they take the same weight.

“Yeah.”

“Of course, I didn’t kill the person who killed Lilly.”

“Like you wouldn’t have, if you could have,” he shoots back. “And I didn’t kill anybody.”

She smirks at him, and he grins back. “Yeah, I know. You’re pretty smart, Weevs.”

It warms him, spreads from his chest out, when she says things like that. “You too, Vee. You think that’s why we get along so well?”

“Well, I don’t hang with any dummies.” 

She settles back in against him, and he grabs a piece of pizza. “Since we’re going deep and meaningful, why Echolls?”

She shrugs, and for a second, Weevil’s convinced she’s going to leave it there. “People had this idea, this notion, that Logan and I weren’t friends. Before. That it was me and Lilly, and him and Duncan, and him and Lilly and me and Duncan. But that’s not really true. I hung out with him all the time. So, it isn’t like I didn’t know him. And then Lilly died, and we all got twisted, and then Logan came back to me.” Her eyes are far away, and she fiddles absently with a pizza crust. “He trusted me. And I trust him. It’s hard, and it backs up on me, sometimes. But I trust him and I get him and he believes in me. He’s the only person I have who saw the way I was and the way I am, and who gets it.” He watches her breathe out. “That’s why Logan. Want it turned around on you?”

“I don’t have a girl, Vee.”

“But you did show up here, looking for me. Why?”

“Some shit went down.”

“You said. What shit?” This is the part of her he forgot, the part of her that refuses to let anything go once she knows it exists. Her eyes gleam and her smile gets fierce, and she turns into the girl who could and would get him out of whatever scrape he’d fumbled his way into in his righteousness.

“A lot of different shit,” he grudgingly admits. “But the final straw was that I fucked with the PCHers, because I could. Stole some of their product, sold it to the highest bidder, and then watched as they got fucked up by the guy they stole from. They told me I was washed up and that I was tamed by some white snatch, and I proved them wrong.”

And then went running to the girl they taunted him with, but he leaves that part out. 

“Product?”

“Rims, baby,” he tells her. “Other auto parts too. Angel was happy to be getting some of the fine shit without having to go through those assholes, and I was happy to provide.”

“Hmm... And they caught on it was you.” She’s watching him with her funny little half smile, and he smiles back.

“They don’t know, but they know. And I could have gone up and dealt with it. But then the same shit would have gone down again. Maybe in a different way. Maybe I wouldn’t have pulled a job, but got fingered anyway. So it was stay, and live that life. Or walk away and hope that I could land on my feet.”

“But who am I going to have as my friend in low places?” She asks, bumping him with her shoulder.

“Baby, I’ll always be that friend for you. You just gotta ask me real nice.”

She snorts, and he slides down. Rests his head on her shoulder for a change of pace. “We should think about whether or not we’re going to stay here, soon.”

“Should we?” 

“I don’t know,” she answers, but the wrong question. “It’s a good location. But your room is too tiny to actually be a room. And I still say that if you’re going to stay you should have a real bed.”

“No, I mean, should we think about that. Or should you think about moving in with your boy?” He glances up at her from under his eyelashes. Willing to let her go, now that he knows she won’t just disappear on him.

“No. I’m not ready for that.” Vee rests her head on his and sighs. “Does that make me a horrible person?”

“Depends on the why, I guess.” 

“Ah, the why,” she says airily. “The why is that I love him, and I trust him, but I’m always waiting on that shoe. I stopped believing in happily ever afters a long time ago.”

Weevil looks up at the stars. “I don’t think I ever believed in it, chica. But sometimes, you just have to pin your hopes to someone, and pray they don’t let you go.”

“I can’t,” she whispers. “I want to, but I can’t.”

“Okay,” he tells her. “That’s okay too. We’ll start looking at other places.”

“It’s that easy?”

She sounds skeptical, like she doesn’t believe in this any more than she believes in fairy tales, and he stifles a laugh. “Yeah, it’s that easy. I don’t give a damn about what Echolls thinks of it. Especially because he’s probably going to be practically living with us anyway.”

It’s true, and something he never thought he’d be good with. Never thought he’d be friendly with Echolls. But he is, and he likes it. Likes what Echolls brings to the equation, and likes what Echolls brings out in Vee. 

“What’s your boy going to say about this, anyway?”

“He gets it.” He looks up at her, at her soft smile. “You want to know why it’s Logan? It’s because I can be at my worst, and he gets it. I’m not saying it’s the healthiest thing ever, because it’s not. But it’s nice to be able to tell him I’m not moving in with him, and not have it become anything it’s not.”

“What’s got you in this mood anyway, Vee?” He asks, because it’s worth the risk. Worth knowing why she’s spilling her guts to him, when he couldn’t get her to open up about anything a week ago.

Veronica ducks her head, and then looks away. “Just thinking.”

It’s more than that. It has to be. But it’s too nice a night, with her, to be asking for answers that don’t actually matter. Being let into her inner world is something that’s worth letting the other stuff go.


End file.
